There's a scene in the movie "A Mighty Wind" in which Ed Begley Jr., playing the producer of a televised tribute concert honoring the fictional music impresario Irving Steinbloom, reminisces with Steinbloom's son about the time the promoter gave him free tickets to a folk music concert.

"The nachas that I'm feeling right now!" crows Begley, using the Yiddish term for pride in the first of a string of untranslated Yiddish. "Because your dad was a mishpucha to me. When I heard I got these tickets to the Folksmen, I let out a geschrei. And I'm running with my friend, running around like a vilde chaya, right into the theater, in the front row. So, we've got the spilkes 'cause we're sitting right there. And it's a mitzvah, what your dad did, and I want to try to give that back to you - a kinehora, say - and God bless him."

It's a surreally funny scene. But, like the rest of the movie, the reasons it is funny are complex, a little unclear and possibly even uncomfortable. Do we smile at the incongruity of Begley, playing an immigrant Swede named Lars Olfen, speaking Yiddish? Or is it tacit recognition of the congruity of an entertainment executive manifesting, in what is surely no big deal, signs of at least outward Jewishness?

These questions are at the heart of "Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting" at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Although the clip from "A Mighty Wind" is not included in the exhibition, it might as well be. Along with archival photographs, hours of audio, video and film clips dominate what is not just a historical overview of Jews in radio, television and film, but a probing look at the sometimes touchy relationship between American media and its audience, Jews and non-Jews alike.

Issues of isolation and assimilation, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust as depicted through the lens of Hollywood, the Communist blacklist, "The Jazz Singer" as the iconic narrative of American Judaism, and the notion of the "vanilla," "crypto" or hidden Jew in pop culture are but a few of the themes in what organizers J. Hoberman, senior film critic for the Village Voice, and Jeffrey Shandler, assistant professor in the department of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, call a "frank, contentious and multi-voiced discussion."

Multi-voiced is right.

In fact, there are so many monitors, screens and squawking loudspeakers scattered throughout the two-room exhibition that it is sometimes close to impossible to focus on a single thread. The multimedia-heavy show, which was originally organized for the Jewish Museum in New York, is an acoustician's nightmare. With the exception of a small booth that has been constructed for "Entertaining America's" examination of the Holocaust in film fiction (warning: viewer discretion is advised), little has been done to isolate one listening or viewing station from the next.

It is, however, worth the aural effort required to tweeze the sound of one presentation from another. Of particular interest is a series of video sound bites on the subject of "Seinfeld," taken from interviews with a variety of scholars and ordinary fans - all Jewish - opining on the television sitcom that, as one participant says an Irish Catholic friend once told him, "did a lot for your people." In this series, we also hear a woman describe the offense she still takes at the "Soup Nazi" episode - a trivialization of the enormity of the Holocaust - even as she goes on to describe why she finds the episode in which Jerry makes out with a date during a screening of "Schindler's List" so funny.

Other highlights of the exhibition include a number of installations, called "shrines," in which artists such as Ben Katchor and Aline Kominsky-Crumb explore notions of Jewishness and culture in ways that go well beyond and occasionally deeper than the conventional didacticism the history museum allows. In Katchor's piece, titled "The Myopic Voluptuary," for instance, the dryly sardonic cartoonist of "Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer" fame uses the history of the plastic novelty item commonly known as Groucho Marx glasses to explore the stereotyping of Jews as simultaneously bookish and sexually dangerous "others."

"Entertaining America" isn't - and shouldn't be - a show that can be easily summed up in a single work of installation art, let alone a review such as this. It starts with the Lower East Side's Jewish nickelodeon operators of the early 20th century - future entertainment moguls William Fox and Marcus Loew among them. (Think 20th Century Fox and Loews Cineplex, if the names sound unfamiliar.) Moving on through such pioneering television series as "The Goldbergs" and "Your Show of Shows" to "Saturday Night Live's" "Jew/Not a Jew" game-show parody, the exhibition presents less a cohesive, chronological narrative than a lively debate embracing several points of view that are sometimes contradictory, and from time to time inflammatory. Despite its foundation in historical research, it feels less like dull didacticism than an argument in a booth at Monk's diner with loud and boisterous friends. Ideas bounce around like banging dishes.

If you're looking for one easily digestible thesis, forget it. If raucousness, honesty and sometimes painful self-awareness are your thing, you've come to the right table.

ENTERTAINING AMERICA: JEWS, MOVIES AND BROADCASTING - Through Jan. 18 at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd St., Baltimore. 410-732-6400. www.jewishmuseummd.org. Open Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays noon to 4. $8, children under 12 $2, adult groups $5 per person, student groups $2 per person.

Public programs associated with the exhibition include:

Dec. 7 from 2 to 4 - Stephen Whitfield, professor of American studies and holder of the Max Richter chair of American civilization at Brandeis University, lectures on "Hollywood's Jews: Images and Impacts." Free.

Dec. 22-24 from noon to 3 - Winter open house, featuring family-oriented programs related to Jewish participation in entertainment. $10 per family.

Jan. 18 from 2 to 4 - David Zurawik, journalist and author of "The Jews of Prime Time," uses television clips to explore the history of Jews on television. $10.