Michael Lerner (rabbi)

Michael Lerner (born 1943) is an American political activist, the editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish interfaith magazine based in Berkeley, California, and the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley.

Michael Lerner was born in 1943 and grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey.

In his youth, he attended Far Brook Country Day School, a private school which 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.

He graduated from Weequahic High School in 1960.

Lerner received a BA degree from Columbia University.

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).

After teaching philosophy of law at San Francisco State University, he took a job as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington and taught ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of literature and culture, and introduction to philosophy.

Distressed over the disintegration of SDS in 1969, Lerner sought to re-organize New Left cadres formerly associated with SDS in 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.

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).

During this period Lerner met several times with boxer Muhammad Ali, who was also active in the anti-war movement, at anti-war meetings organized by Lerner.

Lerner recounts that Ali was the first practicing Muslim he had ever met.

In 1972 he earned a PhD in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley.

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.

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.

In 1977 he received a PhD in Clinical/Social Psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

Meanwhile, he completed a second Ph.D. in 1977, this one in social/clinical psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

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.

His writing reflects a transposition of this analysis to economics too, viz.

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society—one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security."

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After serving for five years as dean of the graduate school of psychology at New College of California (now defunct) in San Francisco, 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.

At his own request, in the 7th grade he switched to a public school in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where his peers were, in his estimation, 80% Jewish.

Lerner was married to Nan Fink until 1991, and married Debora Kohn in July 1998, divorced in 2014 and then remarried to Cat Zavis in 2015.

The two never met or spoke again after this period though in 1995 Lerner received a letter from Ali expressing appreciation for the book Lerner co-authored with Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin.

Muhammad Ali included an invitation to Lerner to speak at Ali's memorial, to represent progressive Jewish faith, which took place in 2016.

Lerner also learned from Ali's lawyer that Ali had been a "big fan" of the rabbi's work and that Ali was really sorry that he had not made more contact with Lerner over the past two decades.

Ali and his wife had intended to do so many times and just hadn't followed through.