Hip Judaism

This is what vibrant religious life looks like in one corner of American Judaism:

• A T-shirt that says “W.W.B.D.?” above a sketch of Barbra Streisand.

• A man in drag teaching Torah.

• A Web site called Mazal Tov Cocktail, a self-described “encyclopaedia of Jewish radical culture” represented by a flaming rag inside a bottle of Manischewitz.

A marriage of hip and Jewish that emerged in the late 1990s has redefined religious identity for irony-loving 20- and 30-somethings from New York to Los Angeles and beyond.

They flock to all-night multimedia celebrations of Jewish holidays; fill nightclubs where Jewish storytellers are the headlining act; start magazines, journals and Web sites – all while wearing a wide array of irreverent clothing. Among the edgier items is a bra made out of yarmulkes.

Traditional Jewish leaders who for years have been wringing their hands over declining religious observance among young people and rising intermarriage rates are hardly rejoicing at the trend. For them, it is a superficial fad as welcome as a Hanukkah bush.

“I’ve heard many off-the-cuff comments that are quite critical,” says Steven Bayme, an expert on contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee, a near century-old advocacy and social service group.

But the young thinkers spearheading these new ventures say their elders should look beneath the kitsch. There, they say, Jewish leaders will find the modern-day answer to the question that has vexed every generation, including this one: how to keep the religion alive.

“Our mission is to promote Jewish literacy and to empower people to take it on their own terms,” says Amichai Lau-Levie, 36, president of Storahtelling, whose shows are an explosion of traditional ritual and contemporary performance.

He sometimes goes onstage dressed as a woman, Hadassah Gross, a Jewish motivational speaker and widow of six prominent rabbis whose motto is “a little bit of irreverence is very good for battling irrelevance.”

“We use edu-tainment. We make them laugh,” Lau-Levie says.

“It’s 95 percent humor, culture, radical fun, and 5 percent meaning. If they want more, they’ll come back next time,”

The significance of this debate within the community cannot be overstated. Jewish groups have spent millions of dollars researching how they can prevent young people from abandoning their faith, as studies have found they are doing in steadily increasing numbers.

Community leaders have started outreach programs ranging from free Israel trips to singles dances to hip cafes – all aimed at trying to hang on to the younger generation.

But these efforts, while achieving some success, haven’t come close to the popularity of the outlets young people have devised for themselves.

Storahtelling is booked around the country. Heeb, a quarterly magazine most identified with the trend, printed 25,000 copies of its latest issue while trying to diversify into other media and continuing its sold-out literary events that have expanded from the United States to London and Berlin.

“What we’re doing is creating Jewish experiences where there otherwise weren’t (any),” says Heeb editor Josh Neuman, 33, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it led to Jews marrying more Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised if it led to Jews becoming more Jewish.

“But it’s definitely not the goal. This audience feels so comfortable because people feel they’re not being manipulated for some larger agenda.”

No one disputes that these events are attracting young people who previously had little or no contact with the Jewish community. However, traditional leaders say it is difficult to see what the happenings provide other than a good time.

Roger Bennett, 36, vice president at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies in New York, says the outlook of young American Jews is not so different than that of young people in other faiths, who also are less inclined to join a worship community and instead express their spirituality informally with friends and through individual prayer, books and magazines.

Evangelical Christian leaders understand this dynamic and have responded by developing new Christian music, literature and film – a model Jewish leaders should follow, Bennett says.

“Jewish history is one of challenge and response. Its very strength is that it changes from generation to generation,” he says. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Bennett is co-founder of Reboot, a nonprofit organization aiming to re-create Jewish community through film, discussion salons, a quarterly journal and music.

The music arm of Reboot has reissued the 1959 album “Bagels and Bongos,” a Latin-Jewish music recording by the Irving Fields Trio. Bennett is also a co-author of “Bar Mitzvah Disco,” a book of photos and essays about the coming-of-age rituals in the 1970s and ‘80s.

The IKAR worship community in Los Angeles was formed last year by 31-year-old Rabbi Sharon Brous, who is also involved with Reboot. The group is religiously traditional, with worship in Hebrew, but it rejects the conventional synagogue approach by making volunteer work and social justice advocacy a central activity of the community.

“I think what the Jewish community has basically done is say, ‘It’s impossible to reach those (younger) people. We’ve been trying. We’ve put all this money into them,’ ” Brous says.

“In some ways, it’s much easier to give up on this population than to look at what changes need to be made.”