General
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,” she 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.”
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.
