After the "Day After" demonstration SLF had called on February 17, 1970 (to protest the verdicts in the Chicago Seven trial) turned violent, Lerner and others were arrested and charged with inciting a riot.

During their trial, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued a public statement (repeated on radio and television) that described Lerner as "one of the most dangerous criminals in America", even though he had never engaged in any act of violence.

Federal agents testifying at the trial later admitted to having played a major role instigating the violence and ensuing riot.

[19] After completing his Ph.D. Lerner moved to Hartford, Connecticut where he served as professor of philosophy at Trinity College until 1975, when he moved back to Berkeley, joined the faculty at the University of California in the Field Studies program and taught law and economics until 1976 when he accepted a position at Sonoma State University for one year in sociology, teaching courses in social psychology.

People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships...

:[25] After serving for five years as dean of the graduate school of psychology at New College of California (now defunct) in San Francisco,[26] Lerner and his then-wife Nan Fink created a general-interest intellectual magazine called Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society.

Tikkun was started with the intention of challenging the Left for its inability to understand the centrality of religious and spiritual concerns in the lives of ordinary Americans.

With his associate editor Peter Gabel, Lerner developed a "politics of meaning": that Americans hunger not only for material security but also for a life that is connected to some higher meaning, and that the failure of the liberal and progressive movements to win a consistent majority support was based on their inability to understand this hunger and to address it by showing Americans and middle income working people in other advanced industrial societies that it was the values of the competitive marketplace and its Bottom Line of money and power that is the fundamental source undermining ethical and spiritual values in the public sphere and then undermining friendships and marriages when these values are brought home into personal life.

[27] This was intended to speak to the hunger for meaning that was characteristic of the thousands of people that Lerner and his colleagues were studying at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health.

[7] Lerner's synagogue 'Beyt Tikkun' became an embodiment of what he described as "neo-Hasidism," passionately pursuing the spiritual dimension of the prayers rather than rushing through them.

Lerner was the spiritual leader of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley, and a member of the Board of Rabbis of Northern California.

In 2005 Lerner became chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives whose mission was to "challenge the materialism and selfishness in American society and to promote an ethos of love, generosity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.

[3] In February 2009 Lerner publicly announced he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and mentioned this in many promotional mailings and published pieces.

[3][5][35] Lerner was associated with and promoted Jewish Renewal, having received his semikhah from the movement's founder, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

He was, for example, outspoken against xenophobia in the United States,[37] and he attempted to build bridges with Christian, Buddhist and Muslim leaders around such issues.

[38] Lerner's call for a spiritual transformation of American society was first articulated in Tikkun and then in his book The Politics of Meaning.

[6] In 2003, the San Diego Jewish Journal described Lerner as "the most controversial Jew in America," writing that "He is relentlessly critical of Israel.

While many of the letters were laudatory ("Your editorial stand on Iraq said publicly what many of us in the Israeli peace camp are feeling privately but dare not say.

It is a loosely organized, unconventional endeavor with a small physical base that is also described by its founder as a "synagogue-without-walls"[46] that, since its founding, has served as a bully pulpit for Lerner.

[51][52] In 2010, Lerner, recovering from cancer, moved Beyt Tikkun closer to his Berkeley home: the East Bay, near the U.C.

[53][54][55] Beyt Tikkun found itself in the middle of controversies in 2005 and 2007 when it invited anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan to speak during Yom Kippur services.

In 2005 Lerner received the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Community Builders Prize from Morehouse College in Atlanta in recognition of his work in forging a "progressive middle path that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine" in his book Healing Israel/Palestine and in his writing in Tikkun magazine.

He was interviewed on Jewish reactions to the Christian Zionist movement of right-wing evangelical pastor John Hagee on the Bill Moyers PBS show on October 7, 2007.

Tell the U.S. to stop sending military supplies to Saudi Arabia, which is the sponsor of some of the most hate-filled teachings in the Islamic world and is one of the most repressive regimes on the face of the earth.