NEW YORK -- There's a wonderful new exhibition in New York that surveys the past 100 years of Russian and Soviet history through the eyes of 50 Jewish artists.


There's another exhibition that explores the complicated question of what it means to be Jewish in a society in which Jews are alternately persecuted and accepted but nearly always regarded as outsiders.


Actually, it's the same show, and it works on several levels, offering a glimpse at the turbulent recent history of both the Russian and Jewish peoples. In the process, it raises interesting questions about the way a minority assimilates into a dominant culture, while being subjected to varying degrees of tolerance and repression.


The show, "Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change," running for four months at New York City's Jewish Museum, is vast: more than 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs, porcelain objects and posters displayed on two floors.


The curators were able to put it together in large part due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As countries formerly under Soviet control opened to the West, the museum could for the first time borrow artworks rarely exhibited outside Russia.


One of the exhibit's most interesting aspects is the different degrees to which the artists focus on their Jewish heritage. For some, it is the dominant theme; other pieces show no discernible trace of the artist's ethnic background.


In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, several artists of note focused on the rapidly disappearing culture of the small market towns, or shtetls, in the western provinces of the Russian Empire, where Jews had been forced to live for over a century.


There was Yehuda Pen, who founded Russia's first Jewish art school in 1897 in Vitebsk, Belorussia, and whose most famous student was a Vitebsk native, Marc Chagall. Pen was among the artists at the turn of the century who benefited from the czarist government's decision to loosen the restrictions and quotas that had kept Jews out of mainstream art academies and away from the big, cosmopolitan cities in the Russian interior.


Pen's realistic paintings of shtetl life -- a watchmaker reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette, surrounded by the tools of his trade, and a husband pleading for a divorce before a tribunal of rabbis -- evoke nostalgia for a way of life even then on the verge of extinction. But not every artist expresses as much sympathy as Pen did for traditional Jewish life.


Natan Altman is ambivalent. In his 1916 sculpture, "Head of a Young Jew," Altman emphasizes his Jewish features -- sensual, thick lips, a large, jagged nose and flowing sidecurls. But the sculptor, who later threw his support to the Bolsheviks and became a leading communist artist, slices the bust on one side, excising half of the wide-brimmed hat and one of the sidecurls that are the hallmark of traditional Jewish attire.


Other works also suggest the conflicts of being Jewish in a predominantly Christian, rapidly secularizing society.


One is by Chagall, who, with his Cubist-inspired dreamscapes of floating people and flying animals, probably did more than any other artist to internationalize the imagery of the Jewish ghetto life in Eastern Europe.


In the 1914 painting, "Festival Day (Rabbi with Etrog)," one of eight Chagalls in the exhibition, a rabbi is poised to enter the darkened entrance to a synagogue on the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. But perched on top of his head, dressed in the exact same clothing, is his miniature "other soul," facing in the opposite direction.


Though he may have felt ambivalent about his religious heritage, Chagall was perfectly clear about the sweeping political and social changes that were engulfing Russia. In the 1920s, he left his homeland for Berlin and then France, returning to the Soviet Union only once before his death in 1985.


But many Russian Jews, weary of the victimization that accompanied their perennial outsider status, eagerly embraced the communist agenda, with its promise of equality, and many Jewish artists became apologists for the new regime.


There could be no more adoring portrait of Lenin, for instance, than the 1924 painting by Isaak Brodsky, a pioneer of Socialist Realism, showing a kindly leader in a plain brown suit and worker's cap, towering over an idealized Kremlin. It is only in retrospect, of course, that such naive faith in a gleaming, technological future, engineered by fair-minded Soviet bureaucrats, seems misplaced.


The exhibition's final section is given over to works by contemporary artists who evoke the cruelty and repression of the former Soviet regime.