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A provocative new show at the Jewish Museum in New York City casts a contemporary artistic eye on Jewish ritual, customs, symbols, and ceremonial objects, by revisiting traditional ideas, objects, and themes in a more secular or private context.

"Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life," on exhibit through Feb. 7, 2010, stretches the Jewish realm to embrace ideas like feminism and spirituality as it also pulls new meanings out of traditional practices. Each piece, installation, or video pushes the viewer to ask questions and seek answers.

An Argentinean artist, Tamara Kostianovsky, writes in the exhibition catalogue that her piece "Unearthed" -- presenting the carcass of a cow created from human clothing and hanging on a metal hook -- she examines "the awareness of a moral responsibility involved in the act of killing." This cow, slaughtered according to the Jewish dietary laws, would not have suffered unnecessarily, and yet Kostianovsky is asking us through her work to look closely at the act of animal killing and develop a visceral empathy with the cow.

Her larger goal, she writes, is to "make us question current military approaches, social injustices, and the way 'fleshy clothed bodies' are treated around the world." And, of course, the way they were treated in her own country between 1976 and 1983.

Israeli artists Hadas Kruk and Anat Stein in "Hevruta-Mituta" have taken on a traditional approach to learning text, chevruta study, where two men would work together, throwing ideas back and forth to penetrate the meanings of the Talmud. As a metaphor and commentary on chevruta, the two artists created a chessboard where red and orange mini-yarmulkes represent the different chess pieces face off as they prepare to engage in the logical sparring that is a chess match.

The yarmulkes themselves, which the artist notes were crocheted by women "while studying, traveling by train, or doing other daily activities," are likely a riff on the role of women who traditionally serve to aid and abet the men, in this case by crocheting the skullcaps.

More directly confronting the sidelining of women in traditional Judaism is a work by American artist Helene Aylon, titled "All Rise: An Installation of a Beit Din as a 'House' of Three Women." The tall wooden cabinets, each inscribed with the words "In G-d we trust" (with the hyphen in pink neon), are flanked on either side by flags made from pink pillow shams. Aylon acknowledges that in traditional Judaism the Jewish court is a male domain by hanging a couple dozen tzitzit, or ritual fringes, below the seats of the chairs in the courtroom.

Accompanying Aylon's piece is a proclamation that states: "Whereas: The Shulchan Aruch and Mishna Torah forbid women to judge or give evidence, I respectfully examine these edicts of Karo and Maimonides for false representations of G-d with words G-d did not say. I respectfully submit that G-d did not say that 'women and minors and idiots and slaves' (among others) could not judge nor give testimony."

In a continuous video that is part of the exhibit, Rabbi Ayelet Cohen of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York, and Arnold Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, question some of the artists about the intentions behind their pieces and then muse about the artists' intentions.

Eisen, for example, wonders whether American artist Allan Wexler's "Gardening Sukkah," which has a retractable roof that is opened to the sky for the week of Sukkot but otherwise serves as a gardening shed, really follows the intent of Jewish law. He mused that the sukkah represents for him the temporariness of human life and wondered how a structure that fits the legal requirements for a sukkah but is nonetheless permanent can really be a kosher sukkah. The artist responded by noting the "convergence of gardening and the celebration of the harvest" and how his sukkah is bridging boundaries, "making the temporary permanent and the permanent temporary."

Another reformulation of a traditional object is the "Rubble Fragment 1" mezuzah by American artist Norm Paris. With broken concrete encasing the traditional scroll and strands of industrial wiring forming the letter shin traditionally written on a mezuzah, Paris's writes that his piece was "fabricated to look like a remnant from a military-industrial site, retrofitted to become an awkward religious marker.... Jewish culture and ritual bridge past histories and contemporary geopolitics in a contentious web of interrelationships and associations."

The works in the exhibit, whose curator was Daniel Belasco, are arranged in four sections: Covering, Thinking, Absorbing, and Building. In "Covering," viewers will encounter pieces like a white satin dress and headdress emblazoned with verses from Psalms in bright red, block letters as a kind of amulet, an apron cum tallit with four tzitzit hanging from its four corners, and tefillin created from woven textiles where electric wires supply the "ongoing signal linking the spiritual community."

"Thinking" offers a graphic novel format for the Book of Esther and a representation of the 10 sephirot, or kabbalistic spheres, in an exploration of the world's problems that mirrors texts of alchemy. "Absorbing" ranges from a Miriam cup for the Passover seder to a ketubah with the bride and groom represented by the wave forms created as they say each other's names. "Building" includes several mezuzot, an eternal light of radiant light film and wire, and an architectural model and digital photographs of an environmentally sustainable synagogue in Evanston, Ill.

Sometimes funky, always imaginative, the pieces in this show invite viewers to talk to each other and even to strangers about what they are seeing; to ask themselves questions about meaning and implications; and even to challenge the artists' chutzpah while at the same time thinking about how broad the boundaries of Jewish practice can be. The artists may not actually be reinventing ritual, but they are finding their ways in a religion whose very design supports change -- even if that change has traditionally been in the hands of the rabbis, not of the artists.