Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel, published the same year as the Six-Day War, deals in part with the rifts among Jews over Zionism. And Aaron Posner’s adaptation–developed in collaboration with Potok and presented by Steppenwolf’s youth-oriented Arts Exchange program–provides an impassioned overview of those issues. But Posner focuses more on Brooklyn in the 1940s and the friendship between Danny Saunders, a Hasidic student with a firebrand rabbi for a father, and the Orthodox but more worldly Reuven Malter. Marc Grapey as the grown-up Reuven is a terrific narrator (though these sections should probably be trimmed), and Hunter Stiebel’s young Reuven and Madison Dirks’s Danny excel as the boys caught between their fathers’ ambitions and their own awakening ideas, conveying well the awkwardness and uncertainty of adolescence. Through 10/30: Sat 11 AM. Also Sun 10/24, 11 AM. Steppenwolf Theatre Company, downstairs theater, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650 (TTY 312-335-3830). $10.