About

"Creative Process" by Samuel Bak. Courtesy of www.puckergallery.com.

About Us

Tikkun is a magazine dedicated to healing and transforming the world. We seek writing that gives us insight on how to make that utopian vision a reality. We build bridges between religious and secular progressives by delivering a forceful critique of all forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination while nurturing an interfaith vision of a caring society — one whose institutions are reconstructed on the basis of love, generosity, nonviolence, social justice, caring for nature, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe. To learn more, read our Core Vision statement.

Our founding editor, Rabbi Michael Lerner, also leads Beyt Tikkun, a Jewish Renewal synagogue in the San Francisco Bay Area. By bringing together progressive Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan, and agnostic/atheist voices to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a Religious Left to counter the power of the Religious Right. The spiritual progressive ideas of Tikkun are amplified through the consciousness-raising efforts of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), the interfaith educational and social action organization of our magazine. Our perspective derived from our desire to spread information about the psychodynamics of American society that we obtained as researchers for the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. In that research we came to understand that while the traditional Left primarily focuses on the ways our society is unfair in its distribution of economic well-being and political rights (both domestically and globally), many Americans face equally pressing spiritual, love, and respect deprivations, which are too often ignored by the liberal and progressive world. By failing to address the hunger for love, kindness, generosity of spirit, and a framework of meaning and purpose that transcends the selfishness and materialism of the competitive marketplace, the Left often makes itself irrelevant to the yearnings of many Americans.

Tikkun began in 1986 in part to address this hunger for love and meaning, and in part as a progressive Jewish alternative to Commentary magazine, pushing back against neoconservatism in the Jewish world and U.S. politics, with strong coverage and analysis of issues related to Israel/Palestine. By arguing that Israeli responses to the two Intifadas were immoral, we helped create the intellectual foundation for the emergence of a variety of U.S. groups critical of Israeli policy toward Palestinians yet supportive of Israel’s right to exist. The Tikkun Community, a network of supporters who share our desire for peace and healing in Israel/Palestine, helped bring our call for an end to unethical Israeli policies (and U.S. support for them) to Washington and beyond. In 2005 — concurrent with the launch of the Network of Spiritual Progressives — Tikkun broadened to become a fully interfaith magazine whose writers and readers also span the religious/secular divide. In addition to publishing a vibrant and continuous flow of online articles available to all readers, Tikkun publishes quarterly web issues available only to subscribers.

Read “Tikkun at 25,” an editorial from our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, to learn more about our history. Also check out the photos and videos from our anniversary celebration here.

While the web magazine is carefully edited, our blog, Tikkun Daily, is different in that we give our regular bloggers pretty much a free hand in what they write, though we ask them to flag when they are diverging strongly from Tikkun’s core editorial positions. We have often published ideas and authors with whom we disagree; to learn our own positions, please read our editorials. In addition, because we are wildly under-financed, we do not have fact-checking staff to exhaustively verify the assertions made in many of our articles, which is one reason we tend to focus more on presenting cutting-edge analyses than on investigative journalism. We continue to look for a publisher or publishing group to help raise the funds necessary to keep Tikkun going.

Tikkun is a nonprofit publication whose survival depends on small but regular donations from readers and network members. Please help us stay afloat by joining the NSP or making a donation!