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Hidary: No frontin’ allowed.

Vanessa Hidary, spoken-word poet

With live music, martini bars and multimedia entertainment. 7:30 p.m., Nov. 21. Jewish Community Center, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge. $54. 203-387-2424, jccnh.org.

The moment a Jewish couple gives birth to a son, a new prayer gets added to the trio on Friday nights: baruch ata Adonai, please God, let my son marry a nice Jewish girl. Amen.

Vanessa Hidary, who performs on Nov. 21 at the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge, is 100 percent Jewish, but she isn't exactly the traditional girl these parents have in mind.

Kicked out of Hebrew school for attending the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Rosh Hashanah, and adept at cornrowing hair while baking up rugelach, the so-called Hebrew Mamita performs a one-woman show of spoken-word poetry that deconstructs the image of what Jewishness looks like.

"You say I don't look Jewish?" she asked audiences in New York City and Los Angeles.

"I say you don't look. Period."

Hidary grew up in New York half-Sephardic, half-Ashkenazi, eating the Syrian food her grandmother cooked, loving hip-hop and fantasizing about emulating Madonna's "Like a Virgin" style of wearing a crucifix around her neck.

While she describes herself as "the quintessential New Yorker" and performs a set about a boyfriend who "fucked me like Brooklyn," the message that permeates Hidary's poetry is clear: There is no quintessential anything — be it a New Yorker, an artist, a woman or a Jew.

"I would like people to see we're a very broad spectrum of people," Hidary says of Jews. "That we come in many different colors and have many different levels of religious involvement."

Hidary knows Jews aren't the only group reduced to a single identity.

"People do this with every community," she says. "With the black community: There are black Americans and blacks from the Caribbean and blacks from West Africa and people just think they are all the same. "

From the L.A. riots to Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass before the Holocaust), Hidary's poetic and rhythmic talents allow her to establish startling cross-cultural connections. Her aspirations began early, but it took Hidary a while to find the right artistic medium.

She attended LaGuardia High School for the Arts as a voice major, then studied acting, writing and directing at Hunter College and Trinity Repertory Conservatory in Rhode Island. But it wasn't until she attended a Def Jam performance at Brooklyn Museum of Arts that she decided on spoken word.

"That's when I realized I wanted to combine a more rhythmic thing, because of my love for hip-hop, with stage performance," she says. With spoken word, "I can say all the things that are racial and raw, and I can really just be myself." After seeing the way people reacted, she knew she had found her calling.

"The way people are inspired by my work is so rewarding," she says. "If that means putting myself on the line a bit, it's worth it for the type of feedback I get."

Plus, Hidary contends, "My friends always joke that no one's life is meant for writing more than my life. It's like, 'How could I not write about this?'" True, she's lived more than her fair share of hilarious cultural and sexual experiences — from learning "nearly fluent" Spanish by watching the Univison soap opera "Sábado Gigante" with her Dominican boyfriend's mother, to feeling a religiosity in the catcall "ga bless you ma."

But Hidary does more than entertain us with over-the-top tales.

"My duty is to help people not feel alone with these issues," she says. "I appreciate performance when something is really personal and I say, 'Oh my God, you're saying what I want to say.'"

Laura Gottesdiener, a senior at Yale, is an Advocate intern.