The brown door

There's many ways to spend a Thursday night in Manhattan. You can see a fantastic and lavish production of La Traviata at the Met or go to the Israel Film Festival. Or meet up with new friends who take you to very unusual and very real places - the kind of places you wouldn't have known existed because they have no websites and when you pass them by in the street, all you see is an open brown door. But you won't see the brown door because it will never even occur to you to look up and notice the building when you're so busy being fascinated by the tacky neon lights of Times Square lighting up the whole neighbourhood.

Behind the brown door hides a synagogue. It reminds me of those grotty buildings in England where you can go upstairs and play pool late into the night. Here, you could go upstairs and find yourself in the Cholent: a club-like establishment for young Jewish people who have turned their backs on their communities or certain aspects of their culture, or the Jewish religion altogether. The dropouts club. They bring their guitars and their shisha pipes, someone makes a huge pot of cholent, and they hang out. The paint is peeling off the walls and the room stinks of the smoke of cigarettes and grass. One of the young men runs a survey for his psychology course. Another one with long curly payes (sidelocks) starts singing Carlebach tunes. Others just sit around the table and talk over a bottle of beer.

It's so comfortable and peaceful here. No one demands anything of you. No expectations, no pressure to conform. They all understand where the others are coming from. Physically, Williamsburg or Boro Park, the major ultra-Orthodox centres of New York. I wonder what they're all up to during the day; how they cope with the confusion, negation, rebellion, and confrontation that's been such a central part of their lives. But when they're at the Cholent, abnormality becomes the norm and nothing's too crazy. At the same time, they can be as Jewish as they want to be - and no doubt, these young people are and will remain very Jewish in their own ways. They need to get away from the stifling and claustrophobic world they grew up in but do not even try to pretend that they can live without it.