Michael Lerner, 81, Is Dead; Founder of a Combative Jewish Magazine
His publication, Tikkun, was a leading voice for left-wing American Jews. His ideas about “the politics of meaning” were embraced by Hillary Clinton.
Michael Lerner, who founded and edited a magazine that became a leading voice for American Jews critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, died on Aug. 28 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 81.
His death was announced by the Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley, which Rabbi Lerner established in 1996, a year after he was ordained. His son Akiba said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Rabbi Lerner’s primary focus in his magazine, Tikkun, was Judaism, Jewish thought, Zionism and Israel. But he also made the news in 1993 when his influence reached the White House: His ideas on what he called the “politics of meaning” (his goal, he said, was “to build a society based on love and connection”) were briefly embraced by Hillary Clinton, the newly installed first lady.
“We need a new politics of meaning,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech in Austin, Texas, in 1993. “We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
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Just how much impact his ideas ultimately had on Mrs. Clinton is unclear; confronted by skepticism over the vagueness of his philosophy — a Baltimore Sun columnist called it “psychobabble” — she soon dropped references to it, at least in public. (Mrs. Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.)
But Rabbi Lerner continued to be concerned about what he called America’s “ethical and spiritual crisis” and the “desire for meaningful connection.” That concern was the focus of his book “The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism,” published in 1996.
These ideas percolated through his magazine, originally published quarterly and later bimonthly, which he founded in 1986 with his wife at the time, Nan Fink. By the late 1980s it had established itself as an outlet for writers who shared his conviction that some form of Palestinian self-determination was not just morally correct but also Israel’s best way forward.
Tikkun was started as an explicit riposte to Commentary, the right-leaning cultural and political magazine that was founded by the American Jewish Committee and that was, and remains, an unconditional supporter of Israel.
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Though Rabbi Lerner was a Zionist, his position was far more nuanced than that from the beginning, and it hardened over the years into frank dismay over Israel’s direction. By March 2023, as Tikkun entered its final year, he was writing of the country’s “pervasive racism towards Arabs” and calling its rulers “a fascist government with little respect for the history and judicial processes of a democratic society.”
The magazine ceased operations this April.
Long before then, Tikkun had advocated positions on Israel that were to the left of mainstream thinking. On the magazine’s cover, the Hebrew word “Tikkun” was defined as “to mend, transform and repair the world.”
That statement reflected the broad ambitions of Rabbi Lerner, who had two doctorates — one in philosophy, the other in clinical and social psychology. He declared in the magazine’s characteristically prolix opening editorial, in 1986, that “our public life must be about more than individuals securing economic benefits for themselves and protecting individual freedoms.”
It was ideas like these that initially attracted the Clintons — Rabbi Lerner’s son recalled that Bill Clinton first wrote to his father when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas — and that later brought on bemused commentary in the press.
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“Unintentionally hilarious Big Brotherism is, in fact, a hallmark of Lerner’s ideas for implementing the politics of meaning,” the journalist Michael Kelly wrote in a 1993 profile of Hillary Clinton in The New York Times Magazine, citing Rabbi Lerner’s proposal that the Department of Labor order “every workplace” to create a “mission statement.”
But it was Israel — its future, past and philosophical underpinnings — that was Tikkun’s central preoccupation. In the magazine’s first issue, Rabbi Lerner declared his personal vision: “Jewish religion is irrevocably committed to the side of the oppressed.” He went on to advocate for “a peace that preserves the integrity and creativity of Zionist Israel, while simultaneously allowing a similar self-determination and genuine liberation for Palestinians.”
In the next issue, the Israeli diplomat and scholar Abba Eban dismissed the idea that annexation of the still-occupied West Bank and Gaza would be part of Israel’s future. “Today,” he wrote, “is no time to be intimidated by a demonology that would make puny illicit squatters the determinant factor in deciding Israel’s moral and political future.”
Jewish thought and writing dominated. A 1990 issue carried an article by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl about the correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem, and one by the poet Allen Grossman called “Jewish Poetry & the Muse.” For much of that decade, leading writers and academics continued to contribute. But by the end of the 1990s — after Rabbi Lerner had moved the magazine to New York from the San Francisco area and then back again — fewer were contributing, and the magazine was losing focus.
“Michael in particular became caught up in a New Age spirituality which eschewed the hard work of religious practice or realpolitik,” a former editor, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, wrote in The Forward this year.
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In 1997, a former editor at Tikkun, Chris Lehmann, revealed that Rabbi Lerner sometimes wrote laudatory letters to the magazine using pseudonyms. He did not deny the charge, but he maintained that he had merely “taken what other people said to me and written it for them.”
By 2019, Tikkun was no longer appearing in print.
Michael Phillip Lerner was born on Feb. 11, 1943, in Newark, the son of Joseph Lerner, a municipal judge, and Beatrice (Hirschman) Lerner. He attended private and public schools in Newark before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in clinical and social psychology from Columbia University in 1964 and Ph.D.s from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, and the Wright Institute in Berkley in 1977.
At Berkeley, he was chairman of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society; at the University of Washington, where he was an assistant professor while pursuing his first doctorate, he founded a militant group, the Seattle Liberation Front, to protest the Vietnam War. In 1970, he was arrested along with others after a demonstration and charged with inciting a riot. (The charges were eventually dropped.)
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In subsequent years, Rabbi Lerner taught at Trinity College in Connecticut, Berkeley and Sonoma State University in California. His books include “The New Socialist Revolution” (1973); “Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life and the Psychology of Individual and Social Transformation” (1986); “The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left” (1992); and “Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation” (1994).
Rabbi Lerner’s marriages to Ms. Fink and Deborah Kohn ended in divorce. He was separated from his third wife, Rabbi Cat Zavis, of Beyt Tikkun. In addition to his son, his survivors include two grandchildren.
“He held himself to impossible standards,” Akiba Lerner said in an interview. “Toward the end of his life he felt despair,” telling himself, “I was supposed to change the world.”
“He felt himself prophetically driven by God.”
