Michael-His Magazine and His Movement

SHANKS, HERSHEL

Love it or hate it, Michael I.erner's Tikkun is a remarkable achievement. In just under Four years, it has become, if not a household word, a recognized journal of the progressive intellectual left,...

...it was only their leadership that had moved to the right...
...His idea for the movement was that "it would be on the side of American workers and it would speak with compassion for Americans," Lerner said in his Express interview...
...His criticism of Israel often seems unrelieved...
...There he roomed with Jerry Rubin, who would become a widely known radical activist...
...Of the remaining 60 percent, he says about one-third angers him...
...For starters, its name proclaims it...
...In 1974 Lerner decided to pursue graduate work in psychology, ultimately earning a Ph.D...
...For several years, I succumbed to the pressure," he admitted, adding that he was guilty of "internalized anti-Semitism...
...There Lerner finished his Ph.D...
...No question Lerner is still fond of the '60s...
...He calls for the Jewish community at large to "unseat these sophisticated charlatans from their positions of influence...
...Another Tikkun addition to the seder service is: "The Land of Israel, which gives bread to two peoples, must be divided in two...
...In 1971, when more militant members who were calling for "liberated territory" had taken over his Seatde Liberation Front, Lerner moved back to Berkeley...
...A relic of the '60s, he bursts out of the blue, flags waving, shotgun blasting, peppering the smug and victorious gatekeepers with a steady stream of buckshot...
...For Yom Kippur, Lerner told a Washington Post reporter that the Jewish people collectively "have a great deal to repent for in light of the action of the State of Israel," referring to its "oppressive" policies in the West Bank...
...He opposes the use of excessive force in suppressing the intifada...
...In 1964, a degree under his belt, the 21-year-old Lerner decided to go to California to pursue graduate work in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley...
...During the journal's four-vear existence, it has lost 1,5 million dollars, almost all Fink's...
...As Edward Alexander, English professor at Tel Aviv University, put it, Lerner became "a favorite display Jew of the news media: a kiphhwear-ing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely 'rabbinic' appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel....He was crowned by The Afeo York Times and the television networks as philosopher king of American Jewry, the ultimate authority on the manifold misdeeds of Israel...
...His father was a state-court judge...
...Without this, he would have a program that probably would attract many more committed Jewish liberals...
...What infuriates those who find him insufferable, however, is his stridency and moral posturing...
...They have written provocative and often insightful articles on a variety of topics not having anything to do with the Israel-Arab conflict...
...He doesn't work through channels...
...Lerner claims "most American Jewish leaders have displayed shortsightedness and cowardice...
...For it is his treatment of this issue that sparks the major alienating force...
...One member of his editorial board, upon hearing that this article was underway, expressed her misgivings this way: "You're going to find that people have a lot of trouble getting along with Michael...
...When Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir came to the United States last November, Lerner arranged another New York Times ad...
...Black anti-Semitism is...a tremendous disgrace to Jews...
...Nan Fink, the now-former publisher, has acknowledged Michael—His Magazine and His Movement ontinued from page 33 that Tikkun is "one of the most frequently quoted...magazines in the United States...
...He is always there to roar at Israel's shortcomings...
...To hype circulation, Lerner gave away approximately 20,000 subscriptions—mostly to Jewish academics, intellectuals and professionals...
...He accuses them of ill-treating him and his magazine: "So-called friends of Israel in the American establishment have continually attacked Tikkun and refused to allow us a genuine place within the organized Jewish community....We are lied about rather than listened to....No wonder, then, that many people in our constituency feel that the only way we can begin to promote our ideas is to articulate them in the mainstreani American press...
...The figure for Commentary is probably higher, although Commentary says it has no idea of its size...
...He obtained one Jewish mailing list on the basis of a promotional piece he claimed he was going to use, and then substituted another promotional piece that would never have been approved...
...Traditionally, Jewish anger has been repressed by the community...
...When he attended Columbia University (1960-1964), he took courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary, He says he is a disciple of Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose classes he attended...
...Alexander also uncovered and quoted from a 1969 article Lerner had written in Judaism magazine in an earlier radical and antijewish incarnation: The Jewish community is racist, internally corrupt and an apologist for the worst aspects of American capitalism and imperialism...
...Lerner himself, so he says, agrees with only 40 percent of the articles appearing in his magazine...
...There he established the Seattle Liberation Front, which he describes as having "500 people in it, organized in about 40 collectives...
...As might be expected of someone with this background and experience, Lerner has proved himself a master of hype...
...After the 1967 Six-Day War, Lerner organized the Committee for a Progressive Middle East...
...Its name appears in big Hebrew letters on the back cover...
...Once these people get beyond these feelings, however, they can discover what's exciting and wonderful about their Judaism andjewishness, and the Jewish people...
...One of Tikkun's "additions" to the Passover kaggadah called for a special prayer before the kiddusk: "This year the Jewish people itself has become the symbol of oppression," it intoned...
...Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz has refused to appear on the same platform with Lerner...
...Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Morton Hurvitz of Harvard Law School, novelist Anne Roiphe, literary critic Ted Solotaroff and Ms...
...So he moved on to Seattle, where he became an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington...
...Another problem may be the quality of Tikkun's editing...
...editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin...
...The media were looking for prominent American Jews to quote in opposition to Israel's handling of the intifada...
...But unlike Commentary {in its description of itself Commentary outlines its general interests and then adds, 'The magazine also takes an interest in Jewish affairs"), Tikkun is known as a Jewish magazine...
...There was too much materialism, there was a lack of spirituality, there was moral insensitivity there," He decided to "create an alternative" that also would be part of the new magazine's mission...
...He was soon the darling of the media...
...But to start a liberal alternative to Commentary is...
...the word tikkun is the verb in the Hebrew concept of tikkun olatn, "to perfect the world,") I.erner himself, using his magazine as a vehicle, has become a kind of spokesperson for the American Jewish "New Age" left...
...His three-day Tikkun conference in December 1988 in New York attracted an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 and widespread media coverage...
...We did not survive the gas chambers and crematoria of Europe so we could become the oppressors of Gaza...
...T] he synagogue as currendy established will have to be smashed...
...The media found in Michael Lerner, however, a Jew who would side with the president: "It wasn't President Bush who made Jerusalem an issue...
...To start a new Jewish journal on the left is not news, certainly not in the secular press...
...Most American Jewish leaders have displayed shortsightedness and cowardice...
...He has always been very full of himself, extremely aggressive and manipulative and consuming in his personal relationships," was another remark...
...Fink is the scion of the West-Coast drugstore chain, Uing's...
...As a first step, he quickly added "conferences" as an adjunct to the Whether Lerner's Tikkun will survive is still an open question...
...To date, Fink says Lerner has received close to $150,000...
...Commentary, the neoconservative right-wing journal of the American Jewish Committee, also played a part in Lerner's thinking...
...His first great idea was to promote Tikkun as the liberal alternative to Commentary...
...Lerner quit the New American Lerner: Activist in the Early 70s Movement he had founded...
...Yet Lerner himself recognizes that an issue of Tikkun can be a heavy dose: "Many of our readers tell us they read one or two articles per issue...
...Characterizing Lerner as "the most successful supplier of designer Jewish leftism to those interested in the latest fashion in Jewish-accented Israel.-bashing," Alexander accused Lerner of doing irreparable harm to Israel as the gentile-appointed courtjew of the American media...
...There is room for some, although not too much, divergence of opinion...
...Lerner himself also may be something of a problem...
...At the Institute Lerner met Fink and they teamed up to create Tikkun: What we decided to do was to create a new constituency among liberals and progressives and a new understanding of the issues...
...Hundreds of thousands [of Americans] remain committed...to the movement for social change of the 1960s...
...The Library Journal described Tikkun as "an exceptionally interesting forum...
...It was Shamir, when he insisted that no Palestinians who reside in Jerusalem could take part in peace negotiations...
...Lerner believed that most Jews were not conservative...
...Thev have asked their subscribers to meet the deficit...
...He cut other corners, according to industry sources...
...So Lerner stated for the press...
...He liked Judaism, but was not as fond of Jews...
...Its lengthy articles "do not make easy reading," said the Los Angeles Times...
...As the intifada has provided Lerner with the catapult to fame, it also may be the greatest obstacle to his success...
...Others have a more recognizable public persona, including E. M. Bronner, Christopher Lasch, Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg and Jacob Neusner...
...In fact, it had been the absence of these things which had so disturbed me about the Democratic party and about the Jewish community...
...His Magazine and His Movement MICHAEL tionable...
...Ultimately Lerner withdrew the suit against the attorney general and decided not to file one against Alexander...
...Still sick with self-love, still dramatizing his courage as a public person, still blaming the Jews for the aggression of their enemies, Lerner has grown fat on the intifada and uses the constant burden of peril of the people of Israel as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement...
...He soon organized a demonstration at the federal courthouse in Seatde in support of the Chicago Eight (the demonstrators, including his former roommate Jerry Rubin, who were arrested at the Democratic National Convention), arguing, "against the use of the courts as an instrument of oppression...
...Lerner compares Israeli retaliation against the Palestinians to "medieval Christian mobs...
...As he recendy told the Berkeley East Bay Express, "I was seeing it [politics] from the inside, and the more I saw, the more I was outraged at the corruption in American politics—and I don't mean financial corruption...
...Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum, president emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Lerner studied nearly 30 years ago, has accused him of writing "vicious, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel words...
...The newspapers at the time described Lerner as the chairman of SDS, but Lerner says it had no chairman—'That was one of the things that was so incredible about the group," Lerner said, reminiscing in late 1989, "It was a radical democracy...
...And, for that matter, I have also argued against the analogy between Israel and South African apartheid...
...While he was pursuing a career in psychology, Lerner was also assessing the Jewish world...
...Tti much (if the American Jewish establishment, he is anathema, Lerner never intended Tikkun to be just an intellectual journal...
...All of that was very consistent with what I had learned from Judaism...
...With the founding of Tikkun, he opened a new chapter in his continuing fight to correct it...
...Nevertheless, she continued, "The voice of the conference, throughout, was the voice of moderation...
...the militants were taking over...
...Indeed so Johnny-one-note was Tikkun's positioning in opposition to Commentary that some of Tikkun's most distinguished editorial board members, like literary critic Robert Alter, resigned...
...Another favorite target is the Jewish neoconservadves...
...Assuming Lerner and Tikkun can weather the current financial crisis— he claims he has received enough donations so that if they continue at their present level there is no crisis—the question remains whether he and it can serve as a rallying point for a previously inchoate mass of liberal, often unaffiliated, Jews...
...In a perverse way, the intifada, coming as it did not long after Tikkun began publishing, is responsible for much of the journal's—and Michael Lerner's—fame...
...Whether the magazine itself will survive is an open question...
...For instance, people couldn't make any sense of the prophets, so the prophets were relegated to a totally honorary status without any serious coming to grips with the meaning of what the prophets were saying...
...The future of Tikkun and its movement is difficult to gauge...
...As Nancy Wartik wrote in the Baltimore Jewish Times of the New York conference, "At one time or another [it] had overtones of a folk festival, a socialists' convention, a feminist meeting [and] a '60s political rally...
...It may be out of business by the time these words appear in print...
...He and a group of like-minded colleagues then formed die Institute for Labor and Mental Health in Oakland in 1977, offering a series of stress reduction workshops...
...loses each vcar is qnes- editor of Tikkun...
...Another recent attack against Lerner came from the vitriolic pen of Edward Alexander...
...L.ale last year Lerner and Fink separated...
...Tikkun defines its name on the cover of each issue: "To mend, repair, and transform the world...
...In the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, as he told the Express, Lerner found "an optimism, a belief in human beings, a sense that moral issues should take precedence over self-interest...
...The newspapers called it the biggest demonstration in Seattle since the general suikc of 1919...
...By all accounts the Tikkun conferences in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles have been major successes...
...Lerner says he is getting the support he needs from the readers...
...Similar though somewhat smaller conferences in San Francisco and Los Angeles repeated the concept on the West Coast...
...Naosweek, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times soon wrote up the new magazine...
...Determinedly spiritual in a way that frightens some potential allies off, his magazine espouses a '60s-anchored, touchy-feely approach Lerner has christened "neocompassionism...
...from the Wright Institute of Psychology in 1977...
...By 1969, Lerner decided that the movement in Berkeley was acting, he told the Express in his recent interview, in "self-destructive ways...
...I have felt since age 12 that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world," Lerner has said...
...Lerner says the vast majority pay for their subscriptions but he could not give an exact figure...
...His personal style riles friends as well as opponents...
...He is always ready to condemn the Jewish establishment for not taking the same position...
...Recently when President Bush objected to Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, thereby raising a question about Israel's claim to sovreignty over Jerusalem, most Jewish leaders were critical of the President's remarks, made gratuitously in answer to a question at a news conference...
...Lerner himself soon got caught up in the movement and organized sit-ins at the CIA recruitment office and at Dow Chemical...
...Whether this appeal will produce the S350.000 the magazine Michael Lemer...
...In an interview, Lerner said that when he wrote these things there was pressure to disguise his Jewish identity in order to become a credible New Left leader...
...Neusner, indeed, is known for his conservative views—which raises another aspect of Lerner's magazine...
...Although Lerner believes some of the points he raised in 1969 were legitimate, he admits he couched them in a format that was "overstated, exaggerated and inappropriate in tone...
...In just under Four years, it has become, if not a household word, a recognized journal of the progressive intellectual left, familiar to supporter and detractor alike, despite its arcane, odd-sounding Jewish name...
...He supported the entire circulation effort by a massive advertising campaign in the Neia Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and other journals and newspapers...
...It is doubtful, however, that Lerner will ever stop attacking the Jewish establishment...
...The ads touted Tikkun as "a magazine to articulate the insights, debate the issues, and develop the strategies for those still moved by the Prophetic Tradition...
...One reason for its success until now is that funding came largely from Tikkun's publisher, Nan Fink, who was l^mer's wife...
...Many of his writers are little-known but leading thinkers in their fields...
...Clearly Lerner himself is one of them...
...According to Lerner, approximately 25 percent of Tikkun's subscribers are not Jewish...
...Alexander responded by recalling that in 1970 Lerner had sued the attorney general of the state of Washington for libel, claiming $2 million in damages because the attorney general had described Lerner's Seattle Liberation Front as "totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism...
...It was a new organization that would replace the SDS...
...Academic and artistic rhetoric abounded...
...Without referring to Alexander's piece, which appeared in several Jewish newspapers, Lerner responded in the July/August 1989 issue of Tikkun, explaining that he has since repudiated these statements in both word and deed...
...The movements of the 1960s hit a nerve when they focused on the alienation and sense of meaninglessness that most Americans experience," he recalls longingly...
...Still political, Lerner explained to the Express, "What we said at the Institute was that the demand of the left should be to create a society that is safe for love and intimacy...
...As Lerner saw it, Commentary was creating the false impression that American Jews were moving to the right...
...Gabriel Cohen, the distinguished editor and publisher of the NationalJeaksh Post and Opinion, told Lerner to "stop crying....No recent publication has had a better press," including in the Jewish press...
...But anger, Lerner maintains, is an effective hook for netting disaffected Jews, who are a significant portion of his readership...
...For example, Kenneth Jacobson, director of Middle Eastern affairs for B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, wrote an article in Tikkun entitled, "Now Is Not the Time to Speak Out...
...His mother served as an administrative aide to Senator Harrison Williams (D-N.J...
...Lerner says he also wants a "New Democratic Party" that would address our "spiritual crisis...
...Fink and l.ci tier have told the magazine's subscribers that they will no longer fund the magazine with their own monev...
...As to its first issue, Newsweek judged that "compared to Commentary's polished performances...Tikkun looks like a dress rehearsal...
...You don't need to be Jewish to subscribe to Tikkun," proclaims a recent ad in the Neu> Yorker...
...As with his Tikkun conferences, Lerner has drawn distinguished names to the magazine as well...
...The articles and editorials for which the magazine is famous—or infamous—arc those dealing with Israel, the Palestinians and the intifada: a special section on 'The Pathology of the Occupation," "Rabin as Pharaoh" and "Israel: Our Collective Guilt"—'The state that claims to be acting as the representadve of the Jewish people is today occupying [sic] one-and-a-half million Palestinians and preventing several million other Palestinian refugees from returning to their homeland...
...Kink resigned as publisher, supposedly to pursue other interests...
...On the other hand, publisher Gabriel Cohen finds it "sparkling" and "provocative...
...At one point, Lerner even considered becoming a rabbi, but ultimately decided against it...
...What he found, Lerner told the Express, was that "Jews were selling out the authenticity of their Judaism...
...More likely, it will continue to enliven Jewish journalism, provide an alternative Jewish voice and keep us all on our toes...
...One New York Times ad organized by Tikkun proclaimed in a large headline, "Israel Must End the Occupation...
...It is by no means a mortal threat...
...Tikkun, Mandelbaum said, produces a "steady stream of anti-Israel bias and poison...
...But in December 1989 Lerner attained a new level of respectability when Seymour Reich, chairperson of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, as well as David Saperstein, a co-director of the Reform movement's Religious Action Center, and Carmi Schwartz, vice-president of the Council of Jewish Federations, appeared together with Lerner in another program at the Y, "Who Speaks for American Jews...
...Lerner's background is more political than journalistic...
...He organizes demonstrations and invites in the secular press...
...HERSHEL SHANKS magazine...
...The spectacle of a former leader of the Free Speech Movement suing a writer for libel would not, Lerner admits, have been a pretty one...
...Lerner, said the rabbi, "has come as close as anyone in the Jewish community to comparing Israel's treatment of Arabs to the Nazi treatment of Jews...
...The 27-year-old Michael Lerner, who in 1970 wore a bandanna and posed for photographs in front of a hammer and sickle, is the father of the man who now plays with his skullcap before a background of Jewish books for the CBS cameras...
...They arc now divorced...
...After just three years, Lerner claimed a circulation of 40,000...
...Gene Lichenstein of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles also attended and wrote "that, for three days at least, it changed my view of the world...
...Michael Lerner regularly appeared, providing the quotation of choice...
...We said, "I-et's create a magazine that addresses politics from a new perspective, from the perspective of the psychological insights we have been developing at the Institute [for Labor and Mental Health...
...He was one of the first, he claims, "to call for Palestinian national self-determination...
...Reflecting its neocompassionistic oudook, the magazine comforts: "Don't feel guilty if you don't read every article...
...It was establishment Jews on one side and Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, on the other...
...The program the ad supported was not nearly as radical as the rhetoric and the means by which it was delivered...
...From the time he was a teenager, he tubbed shoulders with major political figures...
...from the beginning he planned it as the spearhead of a political movement...
...Soon Lerner became a major spokesperson for the Berkeley Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), perhaps the leading contemporary radical student organization...
...as a result, a program planned for New "fork's 92nd Street Y had to be dropped...
...He believes Israel should talk to the PLO, that security arrangements can be made that will prevent a Palestinian state, which he supports, from becoming a lethal threat...
...Another factor that has contributed to Lerner's success is his posturing as the underdog who is taking on the Jewish establishment...
...He says: I choose these articles anyway, because it's important to enable Jews who are angry about the quality of their Jewish upbringing and their subsequent estrangement from the Jewish community and its values to express their negative viewpoints...
...in philosophy in 1972 and organized the New American Movement...
...Lerner argues on strategic as well as moral grounds that the occupation is not simply immoral, it is also stupid (not simply misguided...
...grounds, [.enter has assumed the mantle of a latter-day prophet...
...This organization would at first operate as an alternative center of thinking inside the old Democratic party, while taking steps to ensure an alternative place on the ballot in future elections"—in short, an American third party...
...Besides its conferences, Tikkun has organized discussion groups around the country to ponder articles in the magazine...
...The Village Voice was "struck by [its] richness and intelligence...
...for this is not an anti-Semitism rooted in...hatred of the Christ-killers but rather one rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in the ghetto...an earned anti-Semitism...
...He would sometimes bill people who hadn't ordered the magazine but were receiving it as part of his free subscription campaign...
...Alter wrote a piece for Tikkun's first issue, but after that said, "Never again...
...While Commentary publishes mostly non-Jewish articles, 50 percent of Tikkun's articles treat specifically Jewish topics...
...Shamir.* The ad continued: "Millions of American Jews find your current policies immoral, contrary to what is best in our Jewish tradition, and destructive to the best interests of Israel and American Jewry...
...Critics like writer and political consultant Saul Stern have described it as fuzzy-headed, oftentimes "kooky," anachronistic humbug...
...Again, according to Lerner, "the same irrational dynamics were happening...
...The appeal for subscriber money went out in September 1989...
...He refers to American Jewish leaders as "dinosaurs...
...Aided bv the intifada and the American media's hunger for Jews who will criticize Israel on mora...
...There is a messianic arrogance to Lerner and his self-appointed quest that puts many off...
...People interviewed for this article criticized the magazine as poorly written, excessively dry and too heavy with a sense of its own importance...
...In his magazine, he compared Israeli retaliation against the Palestinians to "medieval Christian mobs [who] responded] to the alleged misdeeds of a single Jew by organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community...
...The ad called for negotiations with the PLO that should not rule out an eventual Palestinian state...
...At the end of the year...
...Lerner claimed it spoke for the "vast majority of American Jews...
...Lerner also threatened to sue Alexander and the papers that printed the article...
...The Washington Post headlined a story about Tikkun s first issue "Target: Commentary—Magazine Under Fire From a New Journal...
...How do we do Lhal...
...Thus Tikkun was born...
...Elie Wiesel also objected and resigned...
...The speakers included Abba Eban, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass...
...The magazine staff itself, refers to its format as "East Coast ugly...
...Like Commentary, Tikkun claims a substantial non-Jewish readership...
...I mean moral corruption," Early in life, Lerner became interested in Judaism...
...The Washington Post said Lerner's words were "worth quoting at length...
...The extra-large headline read: "No, Mr...
...It calls itself a 'Jewish critique...
...Lerner vehemently denies the charge: "I publicly argued against this kind of analogy between Israel and the Nazis...
...Commentary's paid subscription is under 30,000...
...It seemed to me very important politically to drive a wedge there [between the Jewish leadership and the community...
...Despite his pose as bete noire, Lerner's position concerning the Palestinian problem is not far different from that of many liberal Jews in both the United States and Israel...
...That Tikkun is as much a political movement as an opinion journal is not surprising...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
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