Michael Phillip Lerner (February 7, 1943 – August 28, 2024) was an American political activist, the founder and editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish interfaith magazine based in Berkeley, California, and the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley.
As a political activist, Lerner is best known as the leader of the Seattle Seven, an anti-Vietnam protest group that was the subject of an investigation by the FBI and subsequent trial, where charges were later found to be unconstitutional.
Early life and education Michael Lerner was born on February 7, 1943, and grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey.Lerner, Michael. The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism. 1997, page 258-9 In his youth, he attended Far Brook Country Day School, a private school that he characterized as having "a rich commitment to interdenominational Christianity". While he has written that he appreciated "the immense beauty and wisdom of the Christianity to which [he] was being exposed", he also felt religiously isolated, as the child of passionate Zionists who attended Hebrew school three times a week, while at the same time being heavily exposed to Christian-oriented cultural activities in school.
At his own request, in the 7th grade Lerner switched to a public school in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where his peers were, in his estimation, 80% Jewish. He graduated from Weequahic High School in 1960."Distinguished Weequahic Alumni", Weequahic High School Alumni Association. Accessed December 19, 2019. "Michael Lerner (1960) a rabbi and Tikkun magazine publisher and author." Lerner earned a BA degree from Columbia University, and in 1972 he earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1977 he received a PhD in Clinical/Social Psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley.
Activism and the Seattle Seven Early activism While at Berkeley, Lerner became a leader in the Berkeley student movement and the Free Speech Movement, chair of the Free Student Union, and chair from 1966 to 1968 of the Berkeley chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
The Seattle Seven Lerner taught philosophy of law at San Francisco State University,Not to be confused with the actor Michael Lerner who taught literature at the same school, San Francisco State.Bio in Social Praxis, Volumes 2–3, Mouton, 1974 and later took a job as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington.
Distressed over the disintegration of SDS in 1969, Lerner sought to re-organize the SDS into a new organization called the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF) on January 19, 1970. While SLF did not publicly endorse violence as a political tactic, SLF members including Roger Lippman, Michael Justesen, and Susan Stern were also members of the Weather Underground, which had bombing attacks as a central part of its political strategy. After the "Day After" demonstration SLF had called on February 17, 1970 (to protest the verdicts in the Chicago Seven trial) turned violent, Lerner and others were arrested and charged with inciting a riot.
Lerner and his co-defendants became known as the "Seattle Seven". During their trial, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued a public statement (repeated on radio and television) that described Lerner as "one of the most dangerous criminals in America", even though he had never engaged in any act of violence. Federal agents testifying at the trial later admitted to having played a major role instigating the violence and ensuing riot.
The trial culminated in a courtroom brawl (during which Lerner was the only defendant to remain seated), and the presiding judge sent the defendants to jail on contempt of court charges. Lerner was transported to Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in San Pedro, California, where he served several months before the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals overturned his conviction for contempt of court and ordered him released.
Legal results and the Lerner Act The main charges relating to the riot were subsequently dropped by the federal government.
Meanwhile, the Washington State Legislature had passed a law, commonly referred to as the "Lerner Act", that prohibited the University of Washington from hiring anyone "who might engage in illegal political activity", and Lerner's contract was not renewed. (The law was later overturned by the Washington Supreme Court.)
Professorship and research After completing his Ph.D. Lerner moved to Hartford, Connecticut where he served as professor of philosophy at Trinity College until 1975, when he moved back to Berkeley, joined the faculty at the University of California in the Field Studies program and taught law and economics until 1976 when he accepted a position at Sonoma State University for one year in sociology, teaching courses in social psychology. Meanwhile, he completed a second Ph.D. in 1977, this one in social/clinical psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.Bio at Gettysburg College and at Council for a Parliament of World Religions "Middle East peace to be Rabbi Michael Lerner's topic Nov. 11 at Gettysburg College"
In 1976 Lerner founded the Institute for Labor and Mental Health to work with the labor movement and do research on the psychodynamics of American society.Bios at Atlantic Monthly and PBS and In 1979 he received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to train union shop stewards as agents of prevention for mental health disorders, and he simultaneously extended his previous study of the psychodynamics of American society. With a subsequent grant from the NIMH he studied American politics and reported that "a spiritual crisis" was at the heart of the political transformation of American society as well as at the heart of much of the psychic pain that was being treated in individual therapy.This study is described at length in Lerner's book Spirit Matters. His writing also reflected a transposition of this analysis to economics.Information Clearing House Weekend Edition of 6 December 2008 22:07
Tikkun magazine After serving for five years as dean of the graduate school of psychology at New College of California (now defunct) in San Francisco,Mother Jones Magazine May 1985 p. 48 gives New College as a contact address for Lerner. Lerner and his then-wife Nan Fink created a general-interest intellectual magazine called Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society. Tikkun was started with the intention of challenging the Left for its inability to understand the centrality of religious and spiritual concerns in the lives of ordinary Americans.
With his associate editor Peter Gabel, Lerner developed a "politics of meaning": that Americans hunger not only for material security but also for a life that is connected to some higher meaning, and that the failure of the liberal and progressive movements to win a consistent majority support was based on their inability to understand this hunger and to address it by showing Americans and middle income working people in other advanced industrial societies that it was the values of the competitive marketplace and its Bottom Line of money and power that is the fundamental source undermining ethical and spiritual values in the public sphere and then undermining friendships and marriages when these values are brought home into personal life.(See Lerner's book The Politics of Meaning, Addison Wesley, 1996).
This was intended to speak to the hunger for meaning that was characteristic of the thousands of people that Lerner and his colleagues were studying at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. Tikkun was formed to educate the public about the findings of the Institute and to develop some of the implications of that work. However, because it also had an interest in being an "alternative to the voices of Jewish conservatism," Tikkun was criticized by some Jewish groups.
In 1993, First Lady Hillary Clinton included the "politics of meaning" in her synthesis of political and social philosophy she was forming.
In 2002, Lerner organized a group called the Tikkun Community among readers of Tikkun magazine and those who share its editorial vision.
Rabbinical ordination Lerner received rabbinical ordination in 1995 through a beth din (rabbinical court) composed of three rabbis, "each of whom had received orthodox rabbinic ordination".
According to j. the Jewish news weekly, "mainstream rabbinical leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements" have questioned private ordinations such as Lerner's, arguing that non-seminary ordinations risk producing poorly educated or fraudulent Rabbis.
In 1997, Lerner became the first Jewish Renewal rabbi to achieve membership in a local American Board of Rabbis. Since that time, many local Boards of Rabbis have accepted Jewish Renewal rabbis into full membership.
Beyt Tikkun Synagogue Beyt Tikkun Synagogue is a Jewish Renewal congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area founded in 1996 by Lerner and is loosely affiliated with his Tikkun magazine.
San Francisco Chronicle as well as The New York Times called it the "synagogue-without-walls in San Francisco and Berkeley".
Network of Spiritual Progressives In 2005 Lerner became chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives whose mission was to "challenge the materialism and selfishness in American society and to promote an ethos of love, generosity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe." They have since sponsored national conferences on both the East and West Coast. In 2007 Lerner launched a campaign for a "Global Marshall Plan".
Views Jewish Renewal movement Lerner was associated with and promoted Jewish Renewal, having received his semikhah from the movement's founder, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Jewish Renewal is a small Jewish religious movement that Lerner described as "positive Judaism", rejecting what he considered to be ethnocentric interpretations of the Torah.
Lerner's call for a spiritual transformation of American society was first articulated in Tikkun and then in his book The Politics of Meaning. Lerner developed his ideas further in his books Spirit Matters (2000) and The Left Hand of God (2006).
His publications promoted religious pluralism and progressive or liberal approaches to political problems and he attempted to build bridges with Christian, Buddhist and Muslim leaders around such issues.Particularly through the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Controversial views Lerner described some of his views as "very controversial," particularly his views about building peace between Israel and Palestine. In 2003, the San Diego Jewish Journal described Lerner as "the most controversial Jew in America," writing that "He is relentlessly critical of Israel. He eulogizes Rachel Corrie. And he's done more for peace than any conservative we know." That same year, the executive editor of The Jewish Exponent wrote that Lerner "supports every measure against Israel short of its immediate destruction and often makes common cause with those who do plot the eradication of Israel's Jews."
In 1997, former Tikkun editors accused Lerner of publishing pseudonymous letters to the editor that he himself had written. While many of the letters were laudatory ("Your editorial stand on Iraq said publicly what many of us in the Israeli peace camp are feeling privately but dare not say."), a few were critical ("Have you gone off your rocker?"). Lerner admitted that he had fabricated the letters but said his only mistake was not informing readers that the authors' names were pseudonyms.
Criticism of leftist antisemitism