We have three separate archives at present:
- Articles posted to this site from March 2011
- Articles that appeared in the magazine from 1986–February 2011
- Posts on our blog, Tikkun Daily, since it began in July 2009
Our search bar at top right looks through all of them. Enter author, title, or any word or phrase. You can also search by month (e.g., January 1993 or “January/February 1993” will bring up the January/February 1993 table of contents).
This Site’s Archive
In addition to using the search bar, look for articles posted to this site since March 2011 by theme: each link in the lighter blue strip above (Politics & Society, Rethinking Religion etc.) leads to a page with the most recent articles on that theme. At the bottom of each of those pages find a link to all archived articles on that theme. You can also click on a tag at the end of any article and see all other articles with that tag. Articles prior to March 2011 are gradually being copied from our old site’s archive to this new site and so become findable by theme and tag.
Print Archive from 1986 to February 2011
All articles printed in our first twenty-five years are migrating to this site. Click here to see how much is available. Each thematic page that you go to from the lighter blue bar above (Politics & Society, Rethinking Religion, etc.) has a “Highlights from the Tikkun Archives” button at top left linking to articles on that theme. These are being selected by our interns. Over time those pages will include brief descriptors for each selected article, and will become an increasingly useful way to explore the archives.
Can You Help Us?
In building our online archive we depend entirely on volunteer help, brilliantly organized by our lead archive volunteer, Christina Honde. Volunteers have done a huge work over the last two years but there is a lot more to do. We are in urgent need of volunteers who can offer even a regular couple of hours a week from home, online. If you would like to help scan, post, format, or proof articles, or if you would like to help create brief descriptors for each article, please email us at archive@tikkun.org. Tasks still to be done include
- Scanning three years, 1989-92, to post online
- Formatting those pieces to fit our style guidelines
- Proofing numerous articles already formatted and online
- Selecting articles to put on the Highlights from the Archives pages.
- Writing descriptors or “teasers” for those highlighted articles
The first three of those tasks require the ability to learn how to use a new computer program, a good eye for proofing, and the capacity to follow instructions with great care. The fourth requires a passionate interest in the topics Tikkun has covered down the years. The fifth requires the ability to explain simply and intelligently to the general reader what’s significant about the article in question.
The Significance of the Tikkun Archive
Tikkun has played a remarkable role in American politics in the years since it was formed as “the liberal alternative to Commentary and the neo-conservative voices in the Jewish world.” Tikkun has evolved into an interfaith voice of “spiritual progressives” around the world, and has published some of the most interesting Muslim thinkers (including Tariq Ramadan, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Imam Zaid Shakir, Congressman Keith Ellison, and Kabir Helminski), Christian thinkers (including Rev. Brian McLaren, Sister Joan Chittister, Father Daniel Berrigan, John Dominic Crossan, William Sloane Coffin, Tony Campolo, Diana Eck, Father Richard Rohr, Jack Miles, Ched Meyers, Matthew Fox, Walter Brueggemann, Father Hans Kung, Gary Dorrien, and Rosemary Radford Ruether) and Buddhist thinkers (including David Loy, Bernie Glasman, Sharon Salzberg, Robert Thurman). As a preeminent Jewish intellectual magazine we have published writers who would never publish in Commentary or the array of other Jewish mainstream or coffee table magazines—writers that have included Rachel Adler, Woody Allen, Shulamit Aloni, Uri Avnery, Zygmunt Bauman, Jeremy Ben Ami, Noam Chomsky, Arnold Eisen, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, Rabbi Arthur Green, Kim Chernin, Nan Gefen, Rabbi Or Rose, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, David Grossman, Susannah Heschel, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, George Lakoff, Jessica Montell, Judith Plaskow, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Chaim Potok, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Marge Piercy, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Joseph Skibell, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, and more). But Tikkun’s importance has been that it has fostered the growth of two major movements:
- The movement of American Jews and allies of Jews who have come to understand, largely through the work of Tikkun and the many thousands of people influenced by Tikkun, that the best way to support the State of Israel is to help it end the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and to help it overcome the mistaken notion that its security rests on its ability to scare its neighbors rather than to make common cause with them. Tikkun Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner’s ideas are influential among younger Jews even among many who don’t know his name, even though the media has given him along with others on the Left and especially the religious Left, only scant and often dismissive attention. His theology book Jewish Renewal was a national best-seller in 1994 when it was published by Putnam, and its ideas have seeped into the discourse in much of the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Jewish Renewal movements.
- The movement of religious and spiritual progressives, brought together through the Network of Spiritual Progressives and through a series of national and regional conferences sponsored by Tikkun. Many of the ideas and approaches that you now will find in the liberal and progressive circles in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish circles were first explored in Tikkun or at the national conferences Tikkun created. Those ideas have also yielded many national campaigns, most recently the campaign for a Global Marshall Plan and for an ESRA — Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
All this awaits you in the Tikkun archive, and one great way to explore it is to help us improve it!