Anneli Rstaad sat down with the acclaimed author David Grossman to discuss his critically acclaimed novel To The End Of The Land, the politics of language, and his perspectives on Israeli culture today. The book tells the story of Ora, a mother whose son has been called to the front lines of a war with Lebanon, and who, in an act of magical thinking, leaves her home in Jerusalem to evade the ‘notifiers’ who might arrive to tell her of her sons death. In a twist of cruel irony, Grossman’s son was killed in the Lebanese War of 2006 while he was completing the novel.

Boris Kralj’s photography book ‘My Belgrade’ was published at a time when very few contemporary photographic representations of Belgrade existed. The project uses photography to capture fragments of Belgrade – public signs, communist architecture, street fashion, and old record albums. The work expresses a wave of Yugo-Nostalgia that has emerged in response to the failure of independence to bring forth the future many dreamt of. Kralj sat down with me at a café called West Berlin to share the intimate details of his own family’s story, as well as to shed light on the political realities subtly intimated throughout the book. The project is in many ways a protest against the poison of nationalism and the horrors of war which splintered his family amongst the various national factions…

Dana Levy’s recent body of work in photography and video straddles several interrelated themes, from the war between nature and culture, to metaphors for freedom and constraint. Her work extends even to the use and abuse of the environment and the trafficking of natural artifacts as souvenirs. As such, I wish to look at the sites of Levy’s investigations, the locations she has selected for her shoots, which form not only the background to her films’ “action,” but which are integral to the meaning and structure of her work, oftentimes forming bridges among her various visual investigations.

The following letter was written by Hannah Arendt to Gerhardt Scholem, a scholar who made a number of pioneering contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism. The letter was written in response to the publication of Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally published as a series of essays in the New Yorker. Her letter touched me deeply from the moment I first read it. Arendt manages to flippantly dismiss Scholem’s attack, carving a unique position on the direction that Israel in the early 1960’s had begun to take…

Juan Luis Borges candidly discusses his father’s library, immortality, and the mystery of his writing in a fascinating conversation conducted in 1984 by the Professor of Philosophy Tomás Abraham, associate professors Alejandro Rússovich and Enrique Marí, and their students in the Psychology Department of the University of Buenos Aires. The conversation was first published in English by Joshua Ellison, translated, and included in Habitus Magazine’s third issue on Buenos Aires.

In the period of our early national existence – the period of the first temple – we find no trace of the conception of a duality of body and soul. Man, as a living and thinking being, is one in all his parts. The Hebrew word Nefesh includes everything, body and soul, and all that belongs to them. The Nefesh, the individual human being, lives as a whole and dies as a whole; nothing survives. This notwithstanding, early Judaism was not perplexed by the problem of life and death. It knew nothing of the despair which begets the materialistic philosophy of the exaltation of the flesh and of sense enjoyment as a refuge from the emptiness of life; nor did it turn its gaze upward to create in Heaven an eternal habitation for the souls of men. It offered eternal life here on earth. This it did by emphasizing the sense of collectivity, by teaching the individual to regard himself not as an isolated unit, with an existence bounded by his own birth and death, but as a part of a larger and more important whole, as a member of the social body.

When Sonel Breslav, founder of Blonde Art Books, wrote an essay responding to Pauline Oliveros’ question ‘Why can’t sounds be visible?’ she didn’t realize that her response would eventually turn into a call to action. Sternthal Books recently sat down with Breslav, and Matthew Walker, on the occasion of the recent exhibition they curated at Present Company in Williamsburg titled, ‘Render Visible’, to discuss graphic scores, the sound art community, and the possibility of rendering the unseen visible…

When Montreal based photographer Jordan Weitzman rang noted photographer Duane Michal’s buzzer in New York, he didn’t expect to find himself face to face with his idol, forget about having the opportunity to shoot a series of portraits of him. The following article details Weitzman’s encounters with Michal’s, accompanied by the beautiful images he made of him.

The following interview is an excerpt from a longer conversation between Eitan Ben-Moshe and Yael Hersonski, a documentary filmmaker who was nominated for an Academy Award for her film “A Film Unfinished,” a critical analysis of The Nazi propaganda film “Das Ghetto.” To read the full interview, order a copy of the book from our shop.

“Ian, anything material can be taken from you, except for what is in your mind.”

In sixty years my father had amassed many things. Antique clocks. Group of Seven paintings. Three talkative children. A beautiful wife. Family videos. A fancy alarm system to protect the collection from thieves.

“The need to accumulate is one of the signs of approaching death.”

I value my father’s words of wisdom more than Walter Benjamin’s

The telephone rang. I picked it up. A shiver rushed down my spine. I knew it was the Commandant. “Hello Commandant,” I said. My voice bounced off the far wall, and echoed in my ears. I was so caught up in my thoughts that I mistook it for the voice of another, and gasped.

“Why did you just gasp?” the Commandant asked coolly.

“Because I mistook my voice for the voice of another,” I responded.

I couldn’t lie to the Commandant. I had attempted it in the past – had attempted it once in Vienna – and he had recognized it at once for what it was: a big fat lie! He could see right through me.

Unlike my literary peers in the United States and the Rest of Canada – or the R.O.C., as it is now known here in Quebec – I can no longer scribble in English with impunity, which makes for a certain frisson. The Commission de Protection de la Langue Francaise has dispersed 15 inspectors, each of them armed with a tape measure and color chart, to make sure that English lettering on outdoor commercial signs is half the size of the French, and that perfidious Anglophones haven’t painted their half-pint messages in colors more alluring than the French. If Quebec’s language laws tighten just one more notch, I may have to write my novels in words half the size of the French so as not to antagonize our linguistic vigilantes.

To hear him tell it, Guy Yanai’s solitary two-month artist residency in a desanctified 19th-century church in a rural section of upstate New York in 2009 was a season in the back of beyond, like stepping into the yawning gulf of a howling wilderness.

This is a story about sisterhood. Although it was written when the Sotah ceremony was no longer performed (if indeed it ever was), it served as a warning to women who might be tempted to collude against male power. The narrator of the story warns that anyone who tries to circumvent the law will pay with her life, and the final kiss will be a kiss of death. Feminine loyalty will not succeed against masculine rule of law. Actions must be met with consequences, and ultimately justice conquers all.

But I am not willing to read the story this way. I take the liberty of freezing the end of the story one moment prior to the sister’s arrival, just before the sisterly kiss turns to a kiss of death. I search within the Talmud’s paean to quiet obedience for the subversive story that lies hidden between the lines, between the letters…

The Sternthal Journal aims to broadcast socially relevant voices, while infusing the worlds of art and design with philosophical and political introspection. I have never liked authority, and I believe that each individual, so long as they are not harming others, should have the right to determine how they are seen and heard. The goal of this space is to use images, videos, and prose in order to examine political questions from a visual perspective. The articles we publish will sometimes accompany our existing projects, allowing readers to gain more contextual information about our various publications, but they will….