Early Life

Born in 1943 and raised in New Jersey, Michael Lerner earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Columbia University in 1964. That same year, he began his graduate studies at UC Berkeley, where he served as chair of both the Free Student Union and the Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Participation in the Free Speech Movement

Lerner was also active in the so-called Free Speech Movement (FSM), a 1964 eruption that culminated in the occupation of UC Berkeley’s administration building and the arrest of nearly 800 student trespassers. It was the first “takeover” of a campus building in the history of American higher education and set the stage for political actions on campuses for the next generation. As Sol Stern, a former FSM radical-turned-conservative, wrote in 2014: “[T]he claim that the FSM was fighting for free speech for all (i.e., the First Amendment) was always a charade. Within weeks of FSM’s founding, it became clear … that the struggle was really about clearing barriers to using the campus as a base for radical political activity.”

Teaching at SFSU

After graduating from Berkeley, Lerner in 1968 was hired to teach Philosophy of Law at San Francisco State University, but a faculty strike that lasted for several months interrupted his professorial activities.

Denouncing Zionists, Lauding the Black Panthers

In 1969 Lerner participated in a symposium entitled “In All Their Habitations,” whose transcript was printed in Judaism Magazine that fall. At the symposium, Lerner denounced Zionists for being excessively friendly toward the United States but insufficiently friendly towards the Soviet Union. He also compared Black Panther leader Huey Newton to the ancient biblical figure Moses, explaining that they had “both justifiably killed an oppressor.”

Sponsoring a Socialist Workers Party Front Group

Circa 1969 as well, Lerner was a sponsor of the GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee, a front group for the Socialist Workers Party. 

Seattle Liberation Front

In 1970 Lerner accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle. Soon thereafter, he co-founded an organization called the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), which collaborated with the Black Student Union (BSU) and the violent Weatherman organization — the latter of which was led by such luminaries as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn — to carry out a number of anti-war protests and other direct actions in public spaces. SLF’s most famous action was a February 17, 1970 demonstration at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle, which escalated into a riot where SLF and BSU members — wielding pipes and clubs while shouting “Power to the people!” and “Smash the state!” — rampaged through several university buildings and physically assaulted innocent bystanders. All told, approximately 20 individuals were injured. Washington state attorney Slade Gorton, who later went on to become a U.S. Senator, described the tactics of Lerner’s SLF as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.” Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven” who were subsequently charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.” He spent several months in prison before the main charges against him were dropped and he was released.

“I Dig Marx”

In a February 22, 1970 interview with the Seattle Times, Lerner said that he expected to be fired from his academic post at the University of Washington — not because of his involvement in the aforementioned riot, but because “I dig Marx.” Indeed, Lerner saw Marxism as a political and economic system that offered the promise of a psychic liberation akin to the unfettered ecstasy made possible by the use of hallucinogenic drugs. “You have to take LSD,” he said in the early 1970s. “Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is.”

Collaborating with Vietnam Veterans Against the War

During the Labor Day weekend of September 1970, Lerner spoke at “Operation RAW” (Rapid American Withdrawal), a three-day protest march — from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge State Park in Pennsylvania — sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

First Marriage (“Smash Monogamy,” and Celebrating the Deaths of American Soldiers)

In the latter part of 1970 Lerner returned to UC Berkeley, where in October 1971 he wed a teenage girl named Theirrie Cook. During the marriage ceremony itself, Lerner and his bride exchanged rings fashioned out of metal that had been extracted from a downed U.S. military aircraft. At the wedding reception afterward, the cake was inscribed with the words “Smash Monogamy,” a slogan popularized by Weatherman. Shortly after the birth of the Lerners’ son, the couple separated — the mother and child going to live in Boston, and Mr. Lerner opting to reside in Berkeley. When asked why he had chosen to remain so far from his young boy, Lerner answered without hesitation: “You don’t understand. I have to be here. Berkeley is the center of the world-historical spirit.”

Trinity College & the Cambridge Policy Studies Institute (Outgrowth of the Institute for Policy Studies)

After completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1972, Lerner took a job as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he taught courses in ethics, political and social philosophy, philosophy of literature, philosophy of social science, and Marx & Critical Theory (focusing mainly on the teachings of the Frankfurt School). Also during this period, Lerner performed some work at the Cambridge Policy Studies Institute, an outgrowth of the Institute for Policy Studies.

New American Movement

In the early 1970s as well, Lerner was a founding member of the New American Movement.

Graduate School and Two Teaching Positions

Before long, Lerner left Trinity and returned to graduate school at the California-based Wright Institute of Psychology, which had been established by Neville Sanford, a collaborator on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s study of the so-called “Authoritarian Personality,” which, according to Marxian propaganda, was associated with a conservative political orientation. While pursuing his graduate studies, Lerner was simultaneously hired by the University of California to teach in an experimental undergraduate program. Two years later, he took a position as a visiting professor of sociology at Sonoma State College in the Northern Bay Area.

Prayer Group Founder & Therapist

In 1976 Lerner established an East Bay chavurah (Jewish prayer group) and resumed his studies for rabbinic ordination, a goal he would fulfill 19 years later. In 1977 he earned a second Ph.D. in Social & Clinical Psychology from the Wright Institute, and then spent two years working as a therapist at the Contra Costa County Mental Health facilities.

Equating Capitalism with “Hunger for Meaning”

In the mid-1970s, Lerner worked with labor-movement leaders to create the Institute for Labor and Mental Health (ILMH) in Oakland, California, a facility focused on addressing the psychological needs of working people. He became executive director of ILMH and went on to practice psychotherapy for a number of years. In the course of that practice, Lerner came to the conclusion that working-class people in the U.S. were “moving [politically] to the right because the liberals didn’t seem to understand or address the alienation and meaninglessness fostered by the me-firstism of the market economy.” This conclusion formed the basis upon which Lerner gradually developed his concept of people’s “hunger for meaning” which transcended even their desire for material comfort. Lerner would elaborate extensively on this theme two decades later, in his 1996 book The Politics of Meaning.

Dean at New College of California

While serving as Executive Director of ILMH, Lerner was also the Dean of the Graduate School of Psychology at the San Francisco-based New College of California from 1980-85.

Second Marriage, Founding Tikkun Magazine

Lerner met a woman named Nan Fink at ILMH and married her a short time later. Though they were both committed leftists, the two shared a distaste for the Left’s pronounced secularism, which they believed had failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of their comrades on the left. To address those needs, Lerner and Fink sought to create a forum that could provide a “voice of Jewish liberals and progressives” while also recognizing “the importance of speaking to the psychological, ethical and spiritual dimension of human needs.” Toward that end, in 1986 the couple — who would divorce five years later — created the magazine Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society. Tikkun is a Hebrew word that means “repairing the world,” and the magazine professed to blend Jewish spirituality with “the peace movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor movement, struggles for civil liberties, and the disability rights movement.” Its overall philosophy was — and still is — an admixture of Old Testament teachings, medieval cabala mysticism, and Sixties-style campus Marxism.

From 1992-96, Lerner resided in Manhattan where he worked as editor of Tikkun.

Socialist Scholars Conference

In April 1992, he spoke at the Socialist Scholars Conference which was held in New York City.

Rabbinical Ordination

In 1995 Lerner was ordained as a rabbi in the progressive Jewish Renewal Movement. Such ordinations are recognized only by those within the Jewish Renewal community and Reconstructionist Judaism. Orthodox Judaism, the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly all regard these ordinations as invalid.

Establishing Synagogue in San Francisco

In 1996 Lerner established the Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, a Jewish Renewal house of worship.

The Politics of Meaning

That same year, Lerner published The Politics of Meaning, a book expounding the aforementioned political theory that the author had begun to contemplate during his tenure at ILMH two decades earlier. It was a theory to which Hillary Clinton gravitated very publicly in the Nineties. Indeed, she had helped popularize the phrase by using it in a speech on healthcare that she delivered in 1993 — and then in subsequent speeches as well. In 1995, for instance, Mrs. Clinton gave a speech whose very title was “The Politics of Meaning.”

Relationship with the Clintons

For a period during the Bill Clinton administration, Lerner, who had a warm relationship with both Bill and Hillary, was widely regarded as the “guru” of the President and the First Lady. In Hell To Pay, her 1999 biography of Hillary Clinton, author Barbara Olson reported that Lerner, during his years of friendship with Mrs. Clinton, frequently invoked the phrase “Hillary and I believe” as a prelude to identifying points of agreement that he shared with her. But as the 1990s progressed, Lerner, a devoted far-leftist, lost interest in the Clintons when he saw that polling data and focus groups were leading the administration toward moderation on such issues as welfare reform and social-welfare spending.

Third Marriage

In 1998 Lerner married his third wife, Rabbi Debora Kohn, a Jewish theorist of social change.

Anti-Free Market

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lerner was a staunch supporter of the anti-globalization, pro-communism, anti-World Trade Organization movement. He wrote: “The contemporary form of domination does not require colonial armies or imperialist interventions. The free market allows for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, and those few are in turn are able to dominate elections and dictate government policies around the world. Their allies in government created the World Trade Organization to extend their power further in countries whose democratic processes have put environmental, labor, and human rights constraints on the reckless pursuit of profits uber alles.”

World Can’t Wait (Revolutionary Communist Party)

In the early 2000s, Lerner was an endorser of World Can’t Wait (WCW), a direct-action movement organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party to engage in civil disobedience aimed at removing President George W. Bush from office. Other notable endorsers of WCW include: Mumia Abu Jamal, Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill, John Conyers, Jodie Evans, Jesse Jackson, Michael Ratner, Cindy Sheehan, and Lynne Stewart.

Blaming America for Provoking 9/11 Attacks

Lerner said that al-Qaeda‘s 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States had been provoked by America’s attempts to hoard the world’s resources and promote globalization.

Tikkun Community

In January 2002, Lerner founded the Tikkun Community — a network organization co-chaired by Lerner and Marxist professor Cornel West — which described itself as “an international interfaith organization dedicated to peace, justice, non-violence, generosity, caring, love and compassion.” To promote those values, the Tikkun Community urged society to adopt all manner of leftist political and social policies.

Not In Our Name (Revolutionary Communist Party)

In 2002 as well, Lerner joined such notables as Tom Hayden, Al Sharpton, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Carl Dix, Bernardine Dohrn, Leonard Weinglass, and Edward Said in signing the Not In Our Name “Statement of Conscience,” which condemned not only the Bush administration’s “stark new measures of repression,” but also its “unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world.” Not In Our Name was initiated on March 23, 2002 by the longtime Maoist activist and Revolutionary Communist Party member C. Clark Kissinger.

Anti-Iraq War

When the U.S. invaded Saddam Hussein‘s Iraq in March 2003, Lerner, after a short period of waffling on the matter, came out solidly against both the military campaign and the economic sanctions that were imposed against Iraq. As for

9/11 Truther

Lerner was one of 100 “prominent Americans” who signed an October 26, 2004 statement circulated by the organization 911Truth.org, calling on the U.S. government to investigate the 9/11 attacks as a possible “inside job” orchestrated by — or at least facilitated by — the Bush administration.

Network of Spiritual Progressives

In 2005 Lerner founded the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which he co-chaired along with Cornel West and Sister Joan Chittister.

Peace Majority Report

In the mid-2000s, Lerner was an editor of the Peace Majority Report along with such notables as Medea Benjamin, Kathy Kelly, Kevin Martin, Dave Robinson, and Susan Shaer.

In April 2007, Lerner, in conjunction with leftwing evangelist/sociology professor Tony Campolo, drafted and published a manifesto titled “An Ethical Way to End the War in Iraq.” This document called for the U.S. to “repent” and “apologize” for its complicity in the deaths of “hundreds of thousands of innocent people” in the Iraq War, when Americans behaved like “modern-day imitators of the Crusaders who once devastated Muslim countries.” Further, the manifesto demanded the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq; the formation of a new U.S. foreign policy based on “generosity, kindness and genuine concern”; the payment of “hundreds of billions” of dollars in reparations to the Iraqi people; and an American pledge to commit one percent of its Gross Domestic Product for the next 20 years towards “eliminating global and domestic poverty, homelessness, inadequate health care, inadequate education and repairing the environment” around the world. Supporters of the manifesto’s objectives included Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, and Howard Zinn.

Supporting an Ex-Communicated Priest

In 2008, Lerner denounced the Catholic Church for threatening to excommunicate the leftist Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois because the latter had participated in the unauthorized ordination of a female priest. “It’s not just Jews who demean others or see one type of human being as more valuable or closer to God or more appropriate to serve God than another,” Lerner bemoaned.

Supporting the Iran Nuclear Deal

In 2015, Lerner was a staunch supporter of the so-called Iran Nuclear deal that the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany negotiated with Tehran. The key elements of the agreement were as follows:

• Iran would be permitted to keep some 5,060 centrifuges, one-third of which would continue to spin in perpetuity.
• Iran would receive $150 billion in sanctions relief – “some portion” of which, according to President Barack Obama‘s National Security Adviser Susan Rice, “we should expect … would go to the Iranian military and could potentially be used for the kinds of bad behavior that we have seen in the region up until now.”
• Russia and China  would be permitted to continue to supply Iran with weapons.
• Iran would have the discretion to block international inspectors from military installations and would be given 14 days’ notice for any request to visit any site.
• Only inspectors from countries possessing diplomatic relations with Iran would be given access to Iranian nuclear sites; thus there would be no American inspectors.
• The embargo on the sale of weapons to Iran would be officially lifted in 5 years.
• Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program would remain intact and unaffected.
• Iran would not be required to disclose information about its past nuclear research and development.
• The U.S. would provide technical assistance to help Iran develop its nuclear program, supposedly for peaceful domestic purposes.
• Sanctions would lifted on critical parts of Iran’s military, including a previously existing travel ban against Qasem Suleimani, leader of the terrorist Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
• Iran would not be required to release American prisoners whom it was holding.
• Iran would not be required to renounce terrorism against the United States, as the Obama administration deemed such an expectation to be “unrealistic.”
• Iran would not be required to affirm its “clear and unambiguous … recognition of Israel’s right to exist.”
• Whatever restrictions were now being placed on Iran’s nuclear program, would begin to expire – due to so-called “sunset clauses” – at various times over the ensuing 5 to 26 years.

Two days after the Iran deal was formally announced in July 2015, Lerner wrote: “We in the liberal and progressive wing of the Jewish world must loudly and publicly congratulate the negotiators who achieved a deal that will prevent Iran from developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons in the coming years, an agreement that also promises an end to economic sanctions…. While Republicans rushed to denounce the deal, their response has been predictable and hollow, given their consistent policy of opposing anything that might give President Obama the appearance of having done something valuable. Their primary claim to credibility comes from identifying with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who immediately decried the agreement as ‘a historical mistake.’”

Lerner’s Eulogy for Muhammad Ali Becomes a Political Diatribe

In June 2016, Lerner delivered a eulogy at the funeral of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. The rabbi used that forum to promote his own leftist political and social agendas. “The way to honor Muhammad Ali is to be Muhammad Ali today,” he said, meaning, in part, that each individual within the sound of his voice should promptly “tell the one percent who own 80 percent of the wealth of this country that it’s time to share their wealth.” It also meant, said Lerner, that the U.S. should “close our military bases around the world”; “create a guaranteed income” for all people; “help create a Palestinian state”; rid society of “racist police” and “racist judges”; pass a Constitutional amendment requiring the “public funding” of all political elections; and eschew its tradition of perpetually “seek[ing] new ways of domination.” At one point, Lerner shouted:

“Tell judges to let out of prison the many African-Americans swept up by racist police and imprisoned by racist judges, many of them in prison today for offenses like possessing marijuana that white people get away with all the time. Tell our elected officials to imprison those who authorize torture and those who ran big banks and investment companies that caused the economic collapse of 2008. Tell the leaders of Turkey to stop killing the Kurds. Tell Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that the way to get security for Israel is to stop the occupation of the West Bank and help create a Palestinian state.”

Lerner even went so far as to compare himself to Ali: “Both of us were indicted by the federal government for our various stands against the Vietnam War. At the key moment when he had that recognition he used that to stand up to an immoral war to say, ‘No, I won’t go.’”

Israel, Jews, & the Mideast Conflict

Over the years, Lerner has been harshly critical of Israel and the Jewish people, while voicing effusive praise and support for the Palestinians. Some examples:

• In 1969 Lerner wrote that “black anti-Semitism … is … a tremendous disgrace to Jews, for this is … rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in the ghetto.” “In short,” he continued, “this anti-Semitism is in part an earned anti-Semitism.”
• In an article which he wrote in 1970, Lerner charged that “The Jewish community is racist, internally corrupt, and an apologist for the worst aspects of American capitalism and imperialism.”
• Lerner has characterized Israel as a nation whose “repressive” and “fascistic” leadership uses “disproportionate force to repress an essentially unarmed [Palestinian] population.”
• Lerner exhorts Jews everywhere to “allow themselves to hear the cries of pain of the Palestinian people” — as a first step toward atonement for their own transgressions.
• When asked about a barbaric October 2000 lynching of two Israeli reservists by Palestinian police in Ramallah, Lerner replied that he understood “how Israel’s occupation can lead to such violence.”
• “I believe,” Lerner has said, “that the Israeli people will never be safe until the Occupation ends and a new spirit of repentance and generosity spreads through the Jewish people.”
• Lerner urges Jews “to atone for the pain we have inflicted on the Palestinian people in [many] years of brutal occupation, and in forcing so many Palestinians out of their home and not allowing them to return in 1948-49.”
• “Israel needs an atonement for what it has done,” Lerner elaborates, “for the way it has failed to recognize the humanity, the sanctity of life, of Palestinians.”
• Lerner lists, among the transgressions of Israeli leaders, their responsibility for: “expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war”; having “thwarted the implementation of the Oslo accord”; “being psychologically incapable of seeing themselves as the superior force with one of the best equipped armies in the world, facing a group of mostly unarmed civilians”; and countenancing the deep “level of racism” in their society.
• Lerner has written that Jews have repeatedly: (a) “rejected reasonable offers for peace”; (b) sought to “crush the Palestinian national movement”; and (c) “hurt, tortured, falsely imprisoned, killed, or wounded” helpless Palestinians.
• In March 2002, Lerner’s Tikkun Community took out a full-page ad in The New York Times attacking the Jewish state’s “oppressive occupation of the territories” and congratulating Israeli reservists who said they would not serve there. The ad, which said nothing about Palestinian terrorism, featured a cartoon drawing of a hook-nosed, disreputable-looking Jew. Israel was described as a “Pharaoh,” while Israeli troops were likened to Nazis blindly “following orders” in “a brutal occupation” that violated international law and human rights.
• In 2003, Lerner suggested that the international problems in the Persian Gulf could be resolved by forcing Israel to withdraw from all of its “occupied territories.”
• Lerner has encouraged support for, and raised money for, Israeli Marxists and fellow travelers organizing mutiny, insubordination and refusal to serve within the Israeli military, and has regularly granted them space in his magazine.
• Lerner has praised the International Solidarity Movement and its famous anti-Israel activist, the late Rachel Corrie.
• In April 2009, Lerner wrote that Passover had “become a problem for many Jews” because “millions” of them “have been watching Israel’s role in Gaza and the West Bank with particular horror this year.” The “wildly disproportionate response of the Israeli army” in the military operation known as Operation Cast Lead “has shocked and dismayed many Jews whose identification with their Jewishness came primarily through their commitment to its ethical teachings,” he added.
• Lerner supported Judge Richard Goldstone after the latter released his famous 2009 United Nations report which lightly reprimanded the terrorists of Hamas while extensively accusing Israel of having committed “war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity” during Operation Cast Lead. In March 2011, Tikkun presented Goldstone with its Tikkun Award.
• In January 2016, Lerner applauded the pension board of the United Methodist Church for its decision to place five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it would not invest in for reasons related to human rights. Wrote Lerner: “Although we at Tikkun do NOT support a general boycott of Israel, and wish to see Israel remain strong and its security intact, we welcome the action of the United Methodist Church Pension Fund. The action of the UMC Pension Fund is narrowly focused on boycotting and divesting from Israeli and other firms that help perpetuate Israel’s Occupation of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the construction of ‘Jewish-only’ settlements. The Occupation of the West Bank with its attendant oppression of the Palestinian people is not only a violation of the highest values of the Jewish people, it is also the Israeli activity that most threatens to turn Israel into a pariah state and thereby weaken its ability to protect its citizens from the real threats it may face from surrounding hostile powers and forces. For that reason, we support all efforts to boycott the products produced on the West Bank in Israeli ‘Jewish only’ settlements and to disinvest from Israeli and global corporations and institutions that help make the Occupation possible.”
• In the spring of 2016, Lerner wrote the following for the occasion of Israel Independence Day: “[M]any Jews worry that the repressive policies of the State of Israel toward the Palestinian people are leading to a new kind of anti-Semitism spreading globally, this kind based not on religious doctrine but on moral outrage at the way the Palestinian people have been treated in the past 49 years since the Occupation began and anger at Jews around the world who continue to give Israel blind loyalty and accept its policies as necessary.”

Lerner’s Anti-Americanism

Just as Lerner views Palestinian terrorism as a rational response to Israeli injustice, so does he trace the roots of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the doorstep of the United States. He writes:

“The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it’s too easy to simply talk of ‘deranged minds.’ We need to ask ourselves, ‘What is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?’ And why is it that our immediate response to violence is to use violence ourselves — thus reinforcing the cycle of violence in the world?”

Lerner elaborates:

“If the U.S. turns its back on global agreements to preserve the environment, unilaterally cancels its treaties to not build a missile defense, accelerates the processes by which a global economy has made some people in the third world richer but many poorer, shows that it cares nothing for the fate of refugees who have been homeless for decades, and otherwise turns its back on ethical norms, it becomes far easier for the haters and the fundamentalists to recruit people who are willing to kill themselves in strikes against what they perceive to be an evil American empire represented by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Most Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this ‘larger picture.’ It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which is slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets.”

Additional Information

Lerner has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Pacifica Foundation has distributed audio recordings of Lerner’s talks.

Lerner worked collaboratively with the late Professor Edward Said.

Lerner continues to serve as editor of Tikkun magazine, and as a leader of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

Lerner has long cultivated a close relationship with the black scholar Cornel West. Together they have co-authored several books and articles, including the 1997 book Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin.

Additional Resources:

Rabbi Moonbeam
By Steven Plaut
April 24, 2002

Make Welfare Payments, Not War
By Mark D. Tooley
April 27, 2007

Book:

Jewish Enablers of the War Against Israel
By Steven Plaut
2011