TAMY BEN-TOR - "New Performance Work" - NYTimes.com 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea An exceptionally talented comic performer, Tamy Ben-Tor dons bad wigs and fake facial hair to transform herself into funny and despicable stock characters. Two of the four short videos showing on monitors at Zach Feuer concern the politics of Israel, where she was born. She lives in New York now. In one, she plays a man described as a Middle East expert and civil rights activist who speaks in what is meant to sound like Arabic but is in fact gibberish. English subtitles nevertheless indicate that he is expounding on "Jewish lies," which include the myths that adults started out as babies and that paper is made from trees. He claims that all photographic evidence of the Holocaust was produced using Photoshop. The kicker is that he will soon meet with a professor at Yale to discuss lectures he will deliver there and at Harvard. In a related video, Ms. Ben-Tor is a weirdly unctuous male Jewish intellectual who has achieved considerable success in Europe with talks denouncing Israel. He boasts of winning a prize in Berlin for his book "Jew: Keep a Low Profile." In a third role, Ms. Ben-Tor is a laughably humorless American Conceptual artist describing her "practice" - for which she regularly receives grant money - in the kind of fatuously arid and convoluted language favored by scholarly journals and symposium participants. It emerges that the real targets of Ms. Ben-Tor's satire are not particular deluded people but academic institutions that embrace and support ludicrous ideas in the name of open inquiry. She is the George Orwell of today's video art.