Jewish Quarterly Plants Itself Firmly on Liberal Side : New Magazine Aims to Shake Things Up

. . . Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches.

Jeremiah, 9:23

Jewish magazines don’t have patron saints, but if the new intellectual quarterly called Tikkun has a patron prophet it is Jeremiah, the biblical figure who railed against ancient Israel’s moral backsliding and susceptibility to false gods.

“He’s my favorite prophet!” said Michael Lerner, the magazine’s editor and co-founder. “I hope Tikkun will play some of that role.”

Subtitled a “Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society,” the aim of Tikkun, Lerner said, is “to think about emotional and ethical issues. We have mainstream goals and not just Jewish goals.”

Lerner, 43, is a native of Newark, N.J., and a veteran of the New Left. He participated in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and headed the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, later serving as an editor of Ramparts magazine. After moving to the University of Washington, he was indicted for anti-war activities as a member of the “Seattle Seven,” charges that were later dropped.

An observant Jew, Lerner studied for four years at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York with the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. He wears a beard, a yarmulke, and prayer fringes beneath his shirt and observes Judaism’s strict dietary rules.

Now a psychotherapist and social theorist with two doctorates, Lerner is also a founder of the Oakland-based Institute for Labor and Mental Health. His latest book is “Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life . . . and the Psychology of Individual and Social Transformation.”

As befits a magazine whose title, in Hebrew, means “to heal, repair and transform the world,” the essays in the first two issues of Tikkun have been gentle jeremiads, or lamentations.

“The significance of Tikkun (the concept and the magazine),” wrote Los Angeles Rabbi Daniel Landes in the premier issue, “lies in the inner connection between the people Israel and the rest of humanity.”

Citing Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as “great idol-smashers” of the last century and a half, Lerner wrote in the same issue’s founding editorial that, “The notion that the world could and should be different than it is has deep roots within Judaism. But in the late 1980s it is an idea that seems strangely out of fashion--and those who still dare to hope often view themselves as isolated, if not irrelevant.”

In the editorial, Lerner maintained that launching such a publication now, against the ideological currents in Ronald Reagan’s America, represents the same “refusal to accept the world as given, articulated in the prophetic call for transformation, that has fueled the radical underpinnings of Jewish life. . . . To the Prophets, each time the powerless were oppressed was a fresh outrage, each time religion was used as a cover for economic immorality was a new affront to God.”

There are other Jewish magazines of similar ideological orientation, including Midstream, Moment and Present Tense, all of which Lerner praised, but which he also differentiated from Tikkun, which is more theoretical and analytic.

“We’re reportage,” acknowledged Murray Polner, editor of Present Tense, a 36,000 circulation quarterly founded in New York in 1973. “We address the intelligent but middle-brow reader. . . . I think it’s great that we have another liberal Jewish publication in this country. American Jews by every study remain liberal, and we continue to resist the blandishments of the neoconservative Right.”

Tikkun now distributes 40,000 copies, according to publisher and co-founder Nan Fink. A therapist herself, Fink, 46, is a convert to Judaism who has studied in Jerusalem and is “involved in all editorial discussions” for the magazine, and writes a regular column. Within the next year, she said, the magazine hopes to move from quarterly to bimonthly and eventually to a monthly schedule.

Slightly more than half the present circulation is paid, mostly through subscriptions ($16 a year), Fink said. She estimates that it will cost $200,000 annually, in addition to sales revenue, to support the magazine, which now depends on private donors whom she declined to identify.

The publication’s staff of four works out of a comfortable, converted house that Lerner once lived in and still owns, tucked into the leafy Oakland Hills. In addition to its Bay Area base, the magazine’s national editorial board has a strong West Coast flavor, with one-fourth of its membership from California, including half a dozen rabbis and scholars from the Los Angeles area.

Each of the two, 128-page issues of Tikkun published so far has included some fiction and poetry, as well as book and film reviews and letters to the editor. Clearly, the lengthy articles are Tikkun’s centerpieces, and they do not make easy reading. They are scholarly rather than journalistic, and the blocks of text are broken up only slightly by white space and elegant line drawings.

This makeup, Lerner and Fink said, is no accident. At least for the first few issues, the format--known informally around the office as “East Coast ugly”--is designed to be taken more seriously by readers of other, similar-looking intellectual publications around the country, Fink said. Ultimately, there are plans for more color, artwork and photographs.

Articles not focused exclusively on Judaism and Israel in the first two issues include “The Secularization of the University,” “A New Anti-Nuclear Strategy,” “Politics and Anger” and an attack on ABC TV’s miniseries, “Amerika.”

Although it broadly defines itself as a publication of the Left, Tikkun is critical of various Communist governments and movements. While singling out for censure the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews, Lerner wrote in the editorial that “we would be critical of Soviet totalitarianism even if it did not specifically oppress Jews.”

Lerner, who has visited Israel regularly since 1966, said that he is “lovingly critical” of the Jewish state, but has no patience with others on the Left--Jews and non-Jews alike--who hold Israel to higher standards of conduct than other governments they favor and excuse. Nonetheless, he predicts that the magazine will be unfairly attacked for being “anti-Zionist and self-hating.”

In a controversial series of newspaper ads announcing the magazine’s first issue, Tikkun offered itself as an alternative to the highly respected monthly Commentary, published for the last 46 years by the American Jewish Committee. Once liberal, Commentary has gradually become the standard-bearer for the neoconservative movement.

The advertising campaign provoked a number of resignations from the editorial board, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a friend of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz.

“People have asked us why we publicly positioned Tikkun in relationship to Commentary,” Fink wrote in her column. “Our answer is that we wanted to refute the common perception that Commentary is the agreed-upon voice of Jews in the United States.”

In a telephone interview from New York, Podhoretz responded in kind, calling Tikkun “more amateurish than I expected from all the publicity.” He said he did not think the new magazine will become a force in Jewish intellectual circles. “I don’t think very highly of it,” he said, “and I’m not very interested in discussing it. . . . If Tikkun lasts for 46 years, it will deserve to be compared and contrasted with Commentary.”

Actually, the contrast between the two journals’ contents is no more evident than in Commentary’s January issue, which features a cover story, “Another ‘Low Dishonest Decade’ on the Left,” by two of Lerner’s former colleagues at Ramparts, and a series of letters to the editor on alleged anti-Semitism on the part of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

By comparison, Tikkun’s first two covers list articles like “What’s Wrong With the Right?” by Christopher Lasch, and a “Nicaragua Debate” among four experts of varying political views.

In their Commentary article on the Left in the last decade, Peter Collier and David Horowitz write, “We find it hard not to be ashamed of some of the things in which we were involved in the 1960s.”

During the same period, Lerner recalled in an interview, there was pressure to disguise his Jewish identity in order to become a credible New Left leader, and “for several years I succumbed to the pressure.” The same “internalized anti-Semitism,” he said, caused him to be more critical of Israeli policies than he should have been.

Still, Lerner said he believes, the “Jewish religion is irrevocably committed to the side of the oppressed. Jewish history began with a slave rebellion and the success of that rebellion shapes our historical memory and our religious sensibility.”