Michael Lerner

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. Biography Family and education 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. 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. He graduated from Weequahic High School in 1960. Lerner received a BA degree from Columbia University. In 1972 he earned a PhD in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley. In 1977 he received a PhD in Clinical/Social Psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley. 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. Student 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). 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.