NEW YORK—The way Susan Tumarkin Goodman, senior curator at The Jewish Museum, explains it, “Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art” has been organized with the intention of offering “a richer and more nuanced view” of Israel than most Americans can ever see.

“Media accounts show it primarily as a place of conflict,” she explained.

She has clearly succeeded in this endeavor. The exhibition, on view through Aug. 5, shows strange and strangely moving art from and about present-day Israel that is striking in its poignancy.

However, more prominent is the overriding impression of the various degrees of unease with which the people of Israel attempt to lead their different understandings of normal lives. In this environment, what is normal, after all?

War is the constant and unrelenting backdrop to everything in Israel, whether it is explicitly identified or not.

Gillian Laub’s poignant photographs of young Israelis, such as Tal and Moran, May 2002, make it perfectly clear. Her sitters express themselves matter of factly in the pictures’ captions: “We are Tal and Moran, twin sisters, both in the army …”

And just knowing from the titles where Rineke Dijkstra took her two photographs of Daniel, Adi, Shira, and Keren, Rishonim High School, Herzliya, Israel (1999/2000) makes the context of the conflict just as much a part of these pieces. Taken 20 months apart, the images pose difficult questions about what these young people’s futures hold. How many of them will also be in uniform, and how soon? In fact, how many of them are already in uniform?

Guy Raz’s photographs of Lifeguard Towers (2003), presented side-by-side, seem at first to be no more than that—lifeguard towers on beautiful Mediterranean beaches. But look a little closer and you can make out that they fly Israeli or Palestinian flags. Sitting on either Tel Aviv or Gaza beaches, they have been transformed into gaily painted outposts that claim the territory surrounding them, even if it is only a sandy beach.

Yaron Leshem’s Village (2004) is also a little misleading on first sight, for this is not an actual Palestinian village at all. Rather, it is a mock-up built by the Israeli army, complete with chilling trompe-l’oeil portrayals of a civilian population, to prepare troops (including the photographer, himself, when he did his military service) for waging war in rural environments.

Two of the best pieces in the exhibition, though, are videos. Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time (2001) is exquisitely staged: an almost cinema-scale projection appears first through a doorway between galleries, the traffic on the four-lane highway apparently driving straight toward you. In eerie, dream-like, repeated cross-fades, it shows the speeding cars coming to an inexplicable halt, the drivers open their doors and stand upright in the roadway next to their vehicles.

It turns out this piece was filmed on Yom Ha-Zikaron, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of war, when wailing sirens call everyone to mark a two-minute silence. The work needs its explanatory wall panel to be comprehensible, but given the very particular occurrence that it represents, that’s not a shortcoming in my opinion.

No explanation is required for Catherine Yass’s Wall (2004), which is running in the same gallery as Bartana’s piece and acts as its counterpart.

Unlike those Tel Aviv drivers, who will continue on their way after their two minutes of homage, the people on the Palestinian side of the Israeli-built wall in the West Bank aren’t going anywhere soon. Restricting their access into Israel is its stated aim.

Long stretches of Yass’s video are shot at close range from a moving vehicle driving parallel to the wall, so that it runs past the camera, entirely filling its frame, unchanging for mile after mile. It is a memorable image of something insurmountable, both in the literal and a whole range of metaphorical senses.

There are 23 artists included in this exhibition, 16 of them Israelis. Among the non-Israelis are some very big names: Wolfgang Tillmans, Mark Wallinger and Wim Wenders, among them. Everything in the show has been made since the year 1999, and between them, the artists communicate in their different ways what Joan Rosenbaum, the director of the Jewish Museum, calls “the rollercoaster of hope and fear, danger and normalcy that has become a way of life.”