Anita Stein’s Visual Universe of Ancient Jewish Wisdom
On a typical weekday afternoon, Anita Stein can be found driving through the leafy suburbs of Atlanta, en route to picking up her grandchildren from Jewish day school. To the casual observer, she might appear to fit the mold, so to speak. An American bubbe cutting up snacks and running from one unpaid babysitting gig to another — Stein and her husband, Jeff, have a small and steadily growing empire of seven young grandchildren — excelling in the performance of the duty that would be expected for any devoted mother of five Jewish professionals raising children of their own. And yes, she is all these things. Stein relishes in family life; and after raising five children of her own, she has managed to convince three of them to settle in nearby suburbs, where they are raising her grandchildren with her local assistance.
Anita Stein in her studio
But at home, and in her mind, she is also altogether an entirely different thing. She is an artist and visualizer of ancient Jewish text. And her mind flutters with urgent questions of creative wonder: How to depict this phrase from Mishnah? How to represent the feelings evoked by a certain expression of Tefillah? Stein’s kitchen counters are lined with paintbrushes, canvases, and newspapers — not fresh baked chocolate chips cookies and homemade Challahs. A self-described terrible cook, she has occasionally found a fleck of paint on some dish she’s prepared for dinner. And on every drive to carpool, every Shabbat afternoon walk, every grocery store run, she is also somewhere else — within herself — pondering questions of color, form, and representation in her work.
“I’m driving and I pass this billboard that has these leaves of different colors and different shapes, and that’s when a thought for a piece arrives,” Stein said.
“I’m always thinking about my work. That’s how it is as an artist. When your work is so central to you, it never leaves you.”
“Spread Over Us the Shelter of Your Peace" Print
Over the past year, Stein’s work has consisted entirely of the production of linoleum block prints that feature familiar Jewish texts — biblical verses, phrases from Rabbinic literature, and snippets of traditional prayer — printed alongside images representing those texts. These visual representations, which often depict scenes in nature, succinctly capture the essence of their associated expressions of Jewish wisdom, often in unexpected ways.
Consider, for instance, the two prints Stein created to evoke the phrase לבי במזרח (“My heart is in the East”), which Stein kept returning to in the weeks following October 7th. One of the prints features a shaded figure on the left-hand side with a heart cut out of his body and hovering, instead, outside his body on the right (or “eastern”) side of the piece. The work captures the dark, brooding feeling of homesickness in a time of hardship — and yet it is carries a certain airiness of feeling, generated by its nearly comic hyper-literalization of the saying. The other print, featuring the same expression, displays a set of birds sitting on a wire — only one is set apart, unshaded and empty, stuck in the east.
"My Heart is in the East" Print (I)
"My Heart is in the East" Print (II)
At the heart of Stein’s work is an effort to fulfill the Poundian imperative to “make it new.” Her work takes on expressions baked into one of the world’s oldest cultures and immediately renders them as fresh reflections of the current moment. What makes this possible is her uncanny ability to select — or, perhaps, to imagine — a visual representation that can evoke the true feeling at the core of a Jewish textual excerpt . These are often odd and unexpected choices — she uses sheep in her ״ואהבת לרעך כמוך״ (“Love your neighbor as Yourself”) print, and a dandelion to depict the phrase “כל אדם עולם ומלואו” (“Every Person is an Entire World”) — and yet, these choices, arriving from Stein’s intuition, consistently manage to capture the kernel of inherited textual wisdom while also extending it into a new, visual realm.
"Every Person is an Entire World" Print- Hebrew
“A lot of times I’m sitting in shul and I’ll read something in a siddur and I’ll think — Wow, there’s something there,” Stein said. “But it can take a really long time to figure out how to depict that feeling. To choose an image — that’s the hardest part.”
Stein, who is 65, has been painting landscapes and teaching art at Jewish day schools and summer camps for decades. But it wasn’t until October 7th that she decided to begin making prints for the Jewish community and sell her work to the public for the first time.
In the wake of the tragedy, she felt that she was being called upon to make art that conveyed the deep and complex feelings of her people.
“In the first few weeks, I couldn’t stop. If I wasn’t babysitting, I was printmaking!”
Anita Stein
“Jewish art is about sharing, not just making and creating for yourself,” she said. “It is always essentially about the community.”
Since beginning to create prints, Stein still has yet to return to painting landscapes. Instead, her time and artistic energy have become dedicated to her printshop, which raises money for Jewish charities in Israel. For Stein, who’s father survived the Holocaust, proud expression of Zionism is essential in her work, especially when considering today’s political landscape.
