How studying Judaism fits into a Christian university

The first thing any visitor to Pepperdine University’s Malibu campus is likely to see is a prominent, thin, 125-foot stucco tower inlaid with a cross. Probably not surprising for a school founded in the tradition of the Church of Christ.

Jews make up less than half a percent of undergraduates there, so when Michael Helfand, an Orthodox Jew, took a job on the law school faculty in 2010, he didn’t expect his religion to become part of his job description. Then Helfand became associate director of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies.

“One of the most exciting things I get to do at Pepperdine is trying to think about how you introduce a primarily Christian campus to the Jewish story,” he told the Journal. “I would say that’s really, if you want to boil it down, what the Glazer Institute is about.”

The institute runs a gamut of programs its leaders say aim to introduce a predominantly Christian student population to Jewish culture and history. Each year, for instance, it brings dozens of speakers to campus to lecture on Jewish topics and sends students on immersive, monthslong trips to live among Jews in Israel and Buenos Aires.

The institute’s director since 2010 has been Ed Larson, a Pepperdine law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (“Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” 1997). Outside his office window, Pepperdine’s idyllic campus gives way to sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean.

Larson acknowledges that as a Christian university in cosmopolitan Southern California, Pepperdine is “an island on the West Coast,” surrounded on all sides by L.A.’s secular, liberal culture. But he said the school’s religious roots make it ideal for exploring the connections between Judaism and Christianity.

Students at Pepperdine are naturally inquisitive about religion, he said, describing them as “smart in their faith. They’re interested in things like Kierkegaard. They get really excited about [the Glazer Institute’s programs].”

A lanky man with a quick smile, Larson speaks animatedly when discussing the prospect of “broadening Pepperdine out” by introducing students to a faith many know little about, despite the fact that it predates and undergirds their own. He read off a list of new courses the institute was thinking of funding for the coming year, with titles such as “Modern Jewish Literature,” “Literature of the Holocaust” and “Music of the Jewish People.” Professors whose courses are selected will receive a grant of up to $5,000, Larson said.

“Think of how that enriches the curriculum,” he said. “And we do those grants every year and we get a new group of four or five courses worked into the curriculum.”

But the institute’s flagship program is its Brenden Mann Israel Internship, which sends 10 students each year to Israel for eight to 10 weeks during the summer to intern in hospitals, law offices, university research centers and other workplaces.

“I grew up in Utah and didn’t have much exposure to anyone who is Jewish while growing up,” said Peter Warda, a Pepperdine public policy graduate student who interned in Israel in 2014. “So actually working and living with people that were Jewish, that were Israeli — that was very educational for me.”

The institute also sends about 15 students each year to Buenos Aires to live with Jewish families and study the Jewish Diaspora. 

Locally, it gives stipends to a group of Glazer Scholars, students who enroll in a number of classes in Jewish topics and take part in hosting Glazer Institute speakers.

The institute is part of the expansive legacy of the late Jewish real estate developer and philanthropist Guilford Glazer and his wife, Diane. In 2008, the Glazers gave nearly $2 million to open the center, according to the university’s weekly newspaper, the Pepperdine Graphic. Larson said the institute’s founding mission was to promote the businessman’s vision of coexistence between Jews and religious Christians, borne out of a childhood spent in conservative Tennessee.

“He wanted Americans, the people he was used to dealing with [in Tennessee], to think well of Jews. I think that’s as simple as I can put it,” Larson said.

At first, though, it wasn’t clear how to make that happen. While the Glazers endowed the program, they “didn’t want to have weekly or monthly involvement,” according to Roger Alford, the institute’s founding director, now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

“We weren’t exactly sure what emphasis [Guilford Glazer] would want us to take in the early years,” he said.

As a result, the Glazers’ foundation in 2010 brought in John Fishel, formerly the president of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and a board member of TRIBE Media Corp., parent company of the Journal, to act as its proxy at Pepperdine, Alford said.

“I realized fairly quickly that the program at Pepperdine had enormous opportunity but that there was some lack of clarity by the university as to what the intent or purpose had been by the Glazers in making the gift,” Fishel said.

And there were other issues. Fishel noted, for example, that the heavy course load required for students to attain their degree prevented them from taking many Jewish-focused classes, even if they were interested. He has since worked with the school to allow students to gain degree credit for courses in Jewish topics and to refocus the institute’s programs on undergraduates.

Helfand said the seriousness with which Pepperdine takes its faith makes it a perfect candidate for exploring the intersection between the Christian and Jewish religions. In that sense, he said, the school is not too different from Yeshiva University in New York, which he attended as an undergraduate.

“They actually just feel quite familiar,” he said. “It’s like a very similar kind of dynamic: an institution that’s trying to figure out how to incorporate meaningful religious experience into higher education.”