Hang man

Long before he lay in a coffin, froze himself in a block of ice and flirted with a watery death, David Blaine wanted to be Harry Houdini.

Hanging out in Park Slope’s library at age 5 or so, the future endurance artist came across the book “The Secrets of Houdini.”

“It had a really scary picture on it of a man chained sideways alongside a building,” recalls Blaine, 37 (pictured at right). “I had dreams about it!” Soon he was holding his breath in the Y’s swimming pool, seeing how long he could last before passing out. By age 12, he was up to 3.5 minutes — Houdini’s time.

How he does it exactly, he isn’t saying. Illusionists don’t tell their secrets, but they like talking about their idols — which is why Blaine materialized the other day to show us around “Houdini: Art and Magic,” the mesmerizing new show at the Jewish Museum. Why the Jewish Museum? Turns out the Great Houdini (1874-1926) was really Ehrich Weiss, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi. The family emigrated to America, where Ehrich changed his name and — by defying death and making an elephant disappear — became the first in a long line of Jewish prestidigitators.

“Most magicians today are Jewish,” Blaine says. “David Copperfield, Ricky Jay . . . I’m a Jew.”

And, like his hero, he loves the limelight. Houdini, says curator Brooke Kamen Rapaport, was an “apostle of audacity,” a genius at self-promotion, She finds his ability to escape and overcome any obstacle a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America.

The Hanging Man

Blaine is particularly drawn to the old photos in the exhibit. One is a 1917 crowd scene from Providence, RI, showing a portion of the 80,000 fedora-hatted folks who thronged the streets to catch Houdini in action. It’s a stunt the magician repeated over and over, including in, in 1915, Times Square (pictured) — where Blaine spun from a gyroscope, locked himself in ice and turned tricks for charity.

“Look at the number of people turning out to see a guy hanging from a crane,” Blaine says, and turns to a flickering newsreel clip nearby: This time, Houdini’s dangling upside-down (pictured) in front of a window. “I believe he’s hanging in front of The Post building — the Kansas City Post,” Blaine says. “He’d make front-page news doing that!”

Clearly it’s a lesson that Blaine — the premiere public stuntman of our time — has never forgotten.

The Water Torture Cell

Among the 163 objects in the show — pictures, posters, movie and video clips and recent art, like Matthew Barney’s installation featuring live pigeons defacing a lucite coffin — is a replica of the infamous “water torture cell.” It’s an early precursor to the tank Blaine writhed in not long ago on “Oprah,” the clip of which is also in the show.

“There’s a connection between his life and mine,” Blaine says. “Whenever I do something that’s extreme, that seems almost impossible, [I] have to learn new skills, get out of my comfort zone.”

“The Man Who Walked Through Walls”

Joe Coleman’s painting, “The Man Who Walked Through Walls (Harry Houdini)” is a complicated-looking work showing the magician trussed up like Hannibal Lecter, surrounded by images of great escapes, family members and itsy-bitsy writing that’s hard to decipher.

“He painted that with a magnifying glass, to get all those details,” Blaine says, admiringly. “You have to look at it closely.”

Linger over one section and you’ll be able to read about Houdini’s inspiration and namesake, French illusionist Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin.

The Strong Man

Lots of people looked like hulks next to Houdini. “He wasn’t very tall, about 5-foot-5,” Blaine says. “He was in amazing shape. He could inflate his chest, slip his wrists” — in short, find ways to escape straitjackets and milk jugs.

So fit was he strong was he that he used to dare spectators to step right up and punch him in the stomach.

“I do the same thing,” Blaine says. “I like to take punches.” Alas, for Houdini, that was the beginning of the end.

“The rumor is he was laying down, resting, and two college kids came into his dressing room and said, ‘Take this,’ and punched him in the stomach,” Blaine says. “But Houdini was a workaholic — he went out and did his show. At the end he collapsed and they brought him to the hospital, where he died.”

The cause of death, says curator Rapaport, was peritonitis, caused by those blows to the stomach. Turned out, death was the one thing Houdini couldn’t escape — that, and his lifelong adoration of his mother, Cecilia.

Her letters were placed in his bronze casket — one made for his buried-alive stunt — which itself was entombed in the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. On Halloween, no less.

Fans still visit his grave every Halloween, hoping to make contact.

Not Blaine. He’ll be in Queens tonight,

but at PS 1, where he’ll perform — what else? — magic.

Was there anything Houdini did that Blaine would love to do himself?

He smiles and walks toward the elevator, thinking.

“Work til you die!” he says, finally.

The elevator door closes. And David Blaine disappears.

“Houdini: Art and Magic” runs through March 27 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., at 92nd Street; thejewishmuseum.org.