Jay Holstein walked into a University of Iowa lecture hall, wearing a black leather jacket and his signature aviators, and looked out at a room full of trembling freshmen. Then he led class with a line one former student never forgot:
“We are all going to die. Ecclesiastes. So, make every day count.”
Welcome to college, kids.
UI alumnus John Shallman shared that memory in an open letter posted by the university after Holstein’s death.
Holstein, an emeritus professor in the Department of Religious Studies who spent more than five decades at Iowa and taught tens of thousands of students, died Nov. 14, 2025, in Ames after a brief illness. He was 87, according to his family obituary.
He was born March 22, 1938, in Philadelphia, to Belle and Jules Holstein. He graduated cum laude with distinction in philosophy from Temple University, then moved to New York City to attend Hebrew Union College, where he earned bachelor of Hebrew letters and master or arts degrees and rabbinic ordination.
He later completed his doctorate at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
Holstein joined the University of Iowa in 1970 as an assistant professor of Judaic studies in what was then the School of Religion. In 1982, he was appointed the first J.J. Mallon Chair of Judaic Studies and in 2007, he became the J.J. Mallon Teaching Chair of Judaic Studies.
The university honored his 50 years in the classroom in 2020 with a program titled “Jay Holstein: A Golden Legacy of Learning,” and he retired in 2022, according to the obituary and a 2020 university profile.
By then, he had become one of the campus’s most recognizable teachers.
For decades, Holstein regularly filled Macbride Auditorium with more than 800 students a semester in large lecture courses, with long waiting lists and few openings, according to his obituary.
“Every once in a while it happens, rarely, you’re lecturing, and they’re with you, they’re just with you, and you feel such an energy return from them that you feel you could fly,” Holstein said in a filmed interview about his teaching. “It is a high beyond, I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
The Department of Religious Studies said in a Facebook post that he continued to teach his class, Quest for Human Destiny, online each semester even after retirement, and estimated he reached more than 60,000 undergraduates over his career. He received the President and Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2014.
The department announced his death “with heavy hearts,” calling him “one of the most popular professors at the University of Iowa” and offering condolences to his family.
His friend and former wife, Ellen Holstein, is completing his asynchronous Quest for Human Destiny course this fall in his place. In a university remembrance, she said she had hoped he was “one of the immortals,” and now believes “it will have to be his students who carry his flame forward.”
Those former students have been trying to explain what that meant in practice.
State Sen. Zach Wahls, a University of Iowa graduate, wrote that Holstein’s Quest class “was one of my all-time favorites as an undergraduate at Iowa, just like it was for thousands and thousands of students before me.” One of the central lectures, Wahls wrote, focused on Ecclesiastes and emphasized doing “what we can when we can,” appreciating “the gifts we are given” and valuing “humility and grace.”
Mary Kanowitz, another Quest alum, wrote that “Professor Jay Holstein shaped the entire trajectory of my life.” She said she came into his course as “a young woman who wasn’t lost, but definitely seeking,” carrying questions about life and death after losing her father and sister. “His class cracked something open in me,” she wrote. “It was the first time I ever felt true permission to ask the deep, unsettling, beautiful questions about what it means to be human.”
Author and filmmaker Daniel Kraus, who directed a 2010 documentary dubbed “Professor” about Holstein, said in a condolence message that he “will always struggle to convey to the world how important Jay was to my life — and continues to be.”
In the same message, he wrote that “Jay Holstein cannot possibly ever be gone. He is inside every student he ever taught. In Jay’s own quest for human destiny, this was his destiny. His quest is over. Ours continues.”
In a 2020 interview with the University of Iowa, Holstein pointed to specific moments that stayed with him.
He recalled Sept. 11, 2001, when his son in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne was allowed one brief call after the attacks before going into lockdown and eventual deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Two hours later, Holstein still walked into a full lecture hall in Macbride Auditorium. Seeing his students looking back at him, he said, he decided, “If you don’t talk about this, what’s the point?” and gave a lecture on how Jews came to the United States, what the country offered them and what they brought in return, framed by the story of his grandfather who left Latvia intending to go to Palestine, boarded the wrong ship and arrived in Philadelphia without money or English, and still “thrived here and loved this country.”
Holstein is survived by his children, Sarah and Joshua Holstein, his brother David and his former wife and close friend, Ellen. His family suggested memorial gifts to a cat rescue organization or to the University of Iowa Foundation’s Professor Jay Holstein Scholarship Legacy Fund.
Years before his death, in a long-form interview for the Iowa City program “One of a Kind,” Holstein summed up the lesson that ran under much of his teaching.
“I think to learn how to live well means you have to face your mortality,” he said. “And I press on the fact that unless you confront this, you’re going to waste a lot of time in your life, and that may be the number one of all the sins, wasting time when time is all we have.”
Nick El Hajj is a reporter at the Register. He can be reached at nelhajj@gannett.com. Follow him on X at @nick_el_hajj.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: University of Iowa professor Jay Holstein remembered after death at 87
Reporting by Nick El Hajj, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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