The great Jewish-American novelist, Chaim Potok, who died over a decade ago, may have been the first multicultural artist of any serious note. The Chosen, his best known book, has become almost as ubiquitous on high school readings lists as The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- except that The Chosen, also a coming-of-age story, telegraphs from its very title that it's a story about Jews, and religious ones at that.

Jesse Eisenberg, the Academy Award-nominated actor (The Social Network) who has cornered the market on playing complicated, socially awkward young men with chips on their shoulders and bite on their tongues, appears Off-Broadway in The Revisionist, a play he wrote and in which he co-stars at the Cherry Lane Theatre.