Rabbi Michael Lerner is a courageous man.

He’s the founder of Tikkun magazine, a progressive Jewish publication that seeks spiritual healing and advocates nonviolence.

Over Tikkun’s 25 years, he’s taken a lot of grief for criticizing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and for daring to call into question Israel’s brutal tactics.

Now he’s become a victim of goon tactics.

Late Sunday, May 2, or early Monday, May 3, a vandal or a group of vandals entered his property in Berkeley and glued posters to his fence and to his front door.

One poster said, “Fight terror—support Israel.”

Another depicted Rabbi Lerner with Judge Goldstone, who wrote the U.N. report outlining the war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinians during the Gaza invasion.

Lerner has praised Goldstone, and Tikkun is giving him a human rights award next spring. Evidently, the vandals weren’t happy about that.

On his front door, they glued a defaced cover of the current issue of Tikkun, adding this line: “Lerner and Goldstone: Gruesome Twosome. Extreme leftist and Islamo-fascist.”

On another poster, they drew caricatures of Lerner and Goldstone, with Lerner saying to Goldstone: “Any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine.”

Lerner says he didn’t hear the vandals. And he didn’t discover the posters until Monday morning when he got up.

“I felt sick,” he says. “Oh, my God. Of course, my first thought is, ‘Is my wife safe here?’ My family is very upset, and frankly scared.”

Lerner is particularly distressed by the premeditated nature of the crime.

“This wasn’t a random act,” he says. “This was a planned act. It wasn’t spur of the moment.”

Lerner says he’s been getting death threats lately for his defense of Goldstone. Here are three he remembers:

“You’re worse than Hitler. We’re going to kill you.”

“You’re the worst enemy of the Jewish people.”

“You and your Tikkun friends are vermin and deserve to be exterminated.”

That last one, Lerner notes, employs “language Nazis used against the Jews.”

Lerner also points to Alan Dershowitz for helping to create a climate of incitement against him.

Dershowitz wrote a blog for the Jerusalem Post on April 29 harshly criticizing rabbis who have come out in support of Goldstone. “These ‘rabbis for Hamas’ have no shame and no credibility,” he wrote. “They exploit their rabbinical status to support any conclusion that undercuts self defense Israeli actions without regard to the evidence and without regard to the truth. Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that's saying a lot), Michael Lerner . . . has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine's ‘Ethics Award.’ I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner's litmus test of lying about Israel.”

Dershowitz denies having anything to do with the vandalism and says Lerner is trying to “silence my criticism of him.”

Lerner recoils at charges that he is anti-Israel.

“Far from being an enemy of Israel, I believe I’m one of Israel’s strongest supporters,” he says. “I’m for an Israel based on biblical principles of justice, peace, love, kindness, and generosity.”

Lerner is seeking support from progressives. “We need to stick together,” he says.

And he’s urging leaders of the Jewish community to denounce the vilification of Jews who criticize particular policies of the government of the state of Israel.

Says Lerner: “I’ve asked people in the Jewish world to now publicly call for an end to using the term ‘self-hating Jew’ because if you do you are leading to incitement of violence.”

Officer Jamie Perkins of the Berkeley Police Department says her force is investigating the crime.

“At this point,” she says, “we’re asking for anybody who may have information to give us a call about it.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.