The Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies
Faculty and Fellows
Roger Alford, Director
Alford is the founder and the editor-in-chief of International ADR, a comprehensive online international arbitration portal that provides information on relevant treaties, arbitration laws, arbitration institutions and rules, and arbitration awards and decisions. He has authored and edited a number of scholarly articles.
He has authored and edited a number of scholarly articles that have been published in the American Journal of International Law, UCLA Law Review, Ohio State Law Review, New York University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Michigan Law Review, International Lawyer, Virginia Journal of International Law, Berkeley Journal of International Law, and Cornell International Law Journal. He has also co-edited a book on Holocaust Restitution published with New York University Press in 2006. The focus of his scholarship is foreign relations law, international commercial law, human rights law, arbitration, and international courts and tribunals.
Alford is a permanent contributor to the international law blog "Opinio Juris". He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, the Executive Committee of the Institute of Transnational Arbitration, and the Executive Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Prior to joining Pepperdine University's School of Law faculty, Alford served as a senior legal advisor with the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland established by the Volcker Commission to resolve claims to Holocaust-era Swiss bank accounts. From 1995 to 1999, he was an associate with Hogan and Hartson in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, he clerked for the Honorable James L. Buckley of the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia and also the Honorable Richard C. Allison, Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, in the Hague, Netherlands.
Edward J. Larson, 2010 Interim Director
Edward J. Larson holds the Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law and is University Professor of History at Pepperdine University and recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. He served as Associate Counsel for the U.S. Congress Committee on Education and Labor (1983-87) and an attorney with a major Seattle law firm (1979-83) and retains an appointment at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1987.
The author of seven books and over one hundred published articles, Larson writes mostly about issues of science, medicine and law from an historical perspective. His books include A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (2007); Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (2005, 2006 rev. ed.); Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science in the Galapagos Islands (2001), Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (1995), Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (1985, 2003 rev. ed.) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). His next book, An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science, is due out in 2011. Larson’s articles have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Atlantic Monthly, Time, Isis, Science, Scientific American, The Nation, The Wilson Quarterly, American History, Virginia Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and The Georgia Quarterly. He is the co-author or co-editor of eight additional books, including The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison (2005) and The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow (2007). The Fulbright Program named Larson to the John Adams Chair in American Studies for 2001. He participated in the National Science Foundation’s 2003 Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Larson serves on the National Institute of Health’s study section on ethical, legal, and social issues related to the Human Geonome Project and is a Senior Fellow of University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education.
Larson teaches, writes, and speaks on history, law, science, and bio-ethics for academic, professional, and public audiences. He has delivered invited addresses at over 80 universities, including Yale, Cambridge, Cal Tech, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Duke and MIT. He is interviewed frequently for broadcast and print media, including multiple appearances on PBS, NPR, the History Channel, C-SPAN, and BBC. His course on the history of evolution theory is available from The Teaching Company.
Born in central Ohio, Larson attended Mansfield, Ohio, public schools. He earned a B.A. from Williams College (1974), a law degree from Harvard (1979), and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984), and received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the Ohio State University in 2004. Larson has taught in Austria, China, Chile, Ecuador, France, Israel, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, and Italy. He is married to a pediatrician, Lucy Larson, and has two children, Sarah and Luke. They live in Malibu, California, and Athens, Georgia.
Rebecca Golbert, Associate Director
Golbert is the special visiting professor in Jewish Studies in the International Studies and Languages Department at Seaver College. She also serves as executive secretary for the LA Center for International Conciliation and Arbitration and an ad hoc advisor to the Middle East Inter-Group Task Force at the City of Los Angeles Human Relations Commission.
Fluent in Russian and French, Golbert received her undergraduate degree from Princeton, her master's from Pepperdine, and her doctorate from Oxford. At Oxford Golbert completed 16 months of in-depth fieldwork in Kiev, Ukraine, for her doctoral dissertation titled “Constructing Self: Ukrainian Jewish Youth in the Making.” She also completed four months of postdoctoral fieldwork on Holocaust memory and memorialization in central and southwestern Ukraine , where she conducted extensive interviews of Jewish survivors.
She has authored a number of scholarly articles in Jewish Studies, including: “Holocaust Memorialization in Ukraine,” Studies in Polish Jewry (Vol. 20, 2007); “Holocaust Sites in Ukraine: Pechora and the Politics of Memorialization,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 18, No. 2, 2004); and “Transnational Orientations from Home: Constructions of Israel and Transnational Space among Ukrainian Jewish Youth,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (Vol. 27, No. 4, 2001). Additionally, she wrote book chapters for Death and Religion in a Changing World (2006); Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (2006); and Language, Ethnicity and the State, Volume 2: Minority Languages in Eastern Europe post-1989 (2001).
At Pepperdine Golbert teaches an “Introduction to Judaism”, “Jewish Cultures around the World,” and “Holocaust History, Memory, and Representation.” Before joining Pepperdine University in August 2009, Golbert was an adjunct professor at Loyola Marymount University, Mount St. Mary’s College, and University of Maryland at College Park. She was also an Instructor of English, English-language film, and American history in Dalian, China, and an English teacher for Russian-speaking Jews in Los Angeles and for Jewish religious organizations in Kiev, Ukraine.
Michael Helfand, Associate Director
Michael Helfand is an Associate Professor in the School of Law. He received his undergraduate degree from Yeshiva University, his master’s and doctorate in Political Science from Yale University, and his J.D. from Yale Law School. In his doctorate titled “A Liberalism of Sincerity: Lockean Toleration and the Internal Point of View,” Helfand developed a theory of toleration that emphasized the political value of sincerity in providing important protections for religious groups living in a liberal democracy.
Helfand’s scholarship focuses on religious arbitration as a mechanism for legally enforceable faith-based dispute resolution. He has been invited to lecture on the topic of religious arbitration at Seton Hall School of Law, St. John’s School of Law, Yeshiva University, and will be presenting on the topic of rabbinical arbitration at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Schools. In addition, Helfand also consults for the Beth Din (rabbinical court) of America and represents clients seeking enforcement of religious arbitration awards in U.S. courts.
Helfand has also authored articles focusing on the legal protections afforded various minority groups, including “The Usual Suspect Classifications: Criminals, Aliens and the Future of Same-Sex Marriage,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (Vol. 12, 2009); “How the Diversity Rationale Lays the Groundwork for New Discrimination,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (Vol. 17, 2009); “When Religious Practices Become Legal Obligations: Extending the Foreign Compulsion Defense,” Journal of Law & Religion (Vol. 23, 2008).
Helfand’s courses at the School of Law include Contracts I, Contracts II, Arbitration, and Religion and Arbitration. Helfand was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where his practice focused on complex commercial litigation. Before entering private practice, Helfand clerked for the Honorable Julia Smith Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He also currently serves as the Treasurer for the American Association of Law School’s section on Jewish Law.
Andrea Siegel, Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies
Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Dr. Siegel's professional interests span both the academic and the Jewish communal service worlds. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Cultures in May 2011 (dissertation: "Women, Violence, and the 'Arab Question' in Early Zionist Literature"), where she also did her undergraduate work (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). The dissertation is a study of how early twentieth century Jewish writers employ the themes of rape, prostitution, and interracial romance to explore Jewish-Arab relations of the era.
Dr. Siegel joins the Pepperdine University community after teaching at Purchase College SUNY as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and at Columbia University as a Teaching Fellow. She has lectured widely and leads adult-education workshops on modern Hebrew culture. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (honorary), and the Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies. As the 2008-2009 Ralph I. Goldman Fellow at the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Andrea led Hebrew poetry reading and writing groups for Alzheimer's patients in Tel Aviv, conducted research on chaplaincy in Jerusalem healthcare centers, tracked changes in Jewish communities of Asia over the past ten years, and creating recommendations for a new young-adult leadership training program with the Jewish community of Turkey. She subsequently consulted for JDC's "NextGen" Department, developing the conceptual framework for the new Institute for Global Jewish Citizenship, a worldwide multi-year leadership program set to launch in five cities in 2012
At Pepperdine University, Dr. Siegel teaches interdisciplinary courses at the nexus of Humanities and Jewish Studies. Given her interest in experiential education, she is currently organizing a year long service-learning project for Pepperdine University students to partner with a Nazareth-based Israeli-Arab organization for the blind, al-Manarah.
Katie Hyten, Program Coordinator
Hyten graduated magna cum laude from Pepperdine’s Seaver College in December of 2009 and joined the Glazer Institute as assistant to the director in January of 2010. Her studies at Seaver revolved around international relations, conflict management, and Middle East Studies. She wrote her thesis on population growth in Israel and its effect on international relations, and has also written on the status of Jerusalem, the rise of transnational actors on the international stage, and the implementation of international treaties on the national level. Hyten has worked on Capitol Hill for a congressman from Colorado and for RESULTS, an international advocacy organization focusing on hunger and poverty.
At Pepperdine, she has served as a residential advisor and a spiritual life advisor. Hyten speaks Italian and Japanese and has begun individual study in Arabic; she has lived and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Eventually Hyten hopes to continue her education in international conflict resolution and Middle East studies and further a career in faith-based diplomacy.
