Biography: Michael Lerner

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue which meets for prayer and study in both San Francisco and Berkeley, California, and national chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org (co-chaired by Cornel West and Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister). He is the author of eleven books, including Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, a division of Random House), and The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (Harper San Francisco). He was a national leader of the anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam and was described by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI as "one of America's most dangerous criminals". In the 1990's his idea of the need for a "politics of meaning" was embraced by Hillary Clinton, and the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal described his as "the guru of the White House". Lerner, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and a second Ph.D. in social/clinical psychology from The Wright Institute, rejects the notion of being a guru to anyone. His most recent book The Left Hand of God was a national best-seller in 2006, and was praised by Howard Zinn, Jim Wallis, Karen Armstong, George Lakoff, Walter Brueggemann, and many others. He was described by the New York Times as "this year's prophet" and by Cornel West as "the most significant prophetic public intellectual and spiritual leader of our generation". Lerner remains a controversial figure in the Jewish world for his insistence that the rights of Palestinians are equally important as the rights of Jews, for his tireless campaigning against violence of any sort, and his vision that he has more in common with peace and justice and love-oriented members of other religious, spiritual and national groupings than he has with those Jews who remain stuck in paranoid, tribalist and ultra-nationalist conceptions of the world.