By Jordan Heim—On Thursday night, the Goldstein Lecture was held with guest lecturer, Dr. Leslie Morris. Morris’ talk focused on “Jewish Berlin: Textual/Digital/Sacred/Provisional” to a full audience of students, faculty, alumni, and members of the Jewish and Siouxland community in the Yockey Family Community Room in the Olsen Student Center.
Morris’ lecture took the audience on a tour of Jewish Berlin and how the city has the fastest growing Jewish population in the world. The lecture moved past the more usual sites of memory to consider some recent site-specific public art projects that address the traces of Jewish history in contemporary Germany. The talk covered how these projects engage with the debates about Jewish memory and Jewish spaces in Germany today. It also covered the complex re-patterning of Jewish memory and the symbiosis relationship between the Jewish and German cultures and how they are forever intertwined.
Morris is an associate professor of German at the University of Minnesota and served as the founding director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota from 2002–2009. Currently she serves as vice president of publications at the Association for Jewish Studies. Morris is also a published author on a book of history and memory in Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry. She has co-edited Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany with Karen Remmler and Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis with Jack Zipes. She is currently completing her new book, The Translated Jew: Jewish Writing Outside the Margins.
Alex Struck, a senior English education major, enjoyed the lecture and said, “It was very informative to learn about the Jewish culture.” A topic he didn’t know much about prior to the lecture.
Hannah Severson, a senior mass communication major, found the lecture educational and said, “I didn’t know about all the controversy about the monuments in Berlin and the number of monuments dedicated to the Holocaust.”
Bruce Forbes, chair of the department of philosophy and religious studies said, “I appreciate the way these lectures bring together so many people of different backgrounds for thoughtful discussion.”
The Goldstein lecture is an annual lecture named for Harold and Bernice Goldstein and sponsored jointly by Morningside College and Congregation Beth Shalom/The Jewish Federation of Sioux City. This is one of two annual lectures hosted by the religious studies department at Morningside College. The Wright lecture sponsoring a speaker of Christian background and the Goldstein Lecture sponsoring a speaker of Jewish background
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