New York is reborn every day through the collision of cultures, producing new fusions and syntheses. In performance artist Judith Sloan’s new one-woman show, “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide,” an intrepid Jewish teacher weaves documentary, poetry, autobiography and music from her searing encounters with immigrant, refugee and incarcerated youths. With music direction by famed klezmer trumpeter Frank London, the show features musicians Adam Hill and MiWi LaLupa performing a smattering of Jewish, Arabic and Chinese songs, along with hip hop and polka.

Trauma leaves nothing whole. In Alan Lester Brooks’ new play, “A Splintered Soul,” a maverick rabbi in postwar San Francisco risks his life and career to resettle Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Yet aiding others plunges the rabbi into a world of agonizing moral choices, in which things are not always what they seem. “A Splintered Soul” opens Off Broadway Oct. 21 at Theater Three in Midtown with a cast that features Ella Dershowitz, daughter of celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in her New York theatrical debut.