LERNER, MICHAEL

LERNER, MICHAEL (1943– ), activist, editor of Tikkun, and leader of progressive inter-faith movement. Lerner has emerged as a leading voice of the American Jewish leftist community. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Lerner developed an early interest in the writings of Jewish philosophers martin buber and abraham joshua heschel , which he continued during his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and as a student of Heschel's at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Lerner focused attention on the field of Jewish mysticism and especially the concept of tikkun olam, or repair of the world. He enrolled in UC Berkeley's Ph.D. program in philosophy, where he chaired the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society. In his academic career, Lerner took an active role in many of the New Left's protest movements. In 1968, he taught philosophy at San Francisco State University, until a faculty strike closed the school. He accepted a visiting assistant professorship at the University of Washington, where he was arrested as part of the "Seattle Seven" in an anti-Vietnam War protest. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1972, Lerner accepted a position as assistant professor of philosophy at Hartford, Connecticut's Trinity College. In the mid-1970s, Lerner refocused his intellectual interests and social protest priorities along Jewish spiritual and religious lines. He studied under Renewal Judaism's founding rabbi, zalman schachter-shalomi , eventually earning rabbinic ordination. Lerner launched Tikkun magazine in 1986, with the purpose of shaping the publication into "the voice of Jewish liberals and progressives." His principled opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip placed Lerner and his magazine in the middle of contentious political debates. As a Zionist, Lerner often faced criticism from many Leftist anti-Zionists who considered the State of Israel a colonial and imperialist power. As a Leftist, Lerner routinely engaged mainstream and right-leaning American Jews who considered his support for a two-state solution to the Midlle East crisis a threat to the Jewish state. Lerner was drawn into national politics, as well. His publication The Politics of Meaning was embraced by First Lady Hillary Clinton as a template for future social reform, while his book Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, co-authored with Cornel West, sought to carry the famed black-Jewish alliance of the early civil rights years into the next generation. In 2002, Lerner, together with West, created the Tikkun Community, an attempt to bridge the progressive political world with an interfaith spiritual revival. Lerner's journey from a New Left secular political activist to an advocate for spiritual Judaism, and finally to leader in the inter-faith progressive community, mirrored the development of postwar social reform movements. Beginning with calls for civil equality in the 1950s and an end to the Vietnam War by the late 1960s, they continued with an ethnic and religious revival typified by Black Power and a rebirth in American Zionism, and concluded, as Lerner's career has demonstrated, with a faith-based movement for inter-religious cooperation and understanding in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.