Marc Lieberman

He was born Marc Frank Lieberman on July 7, 1949, in Baltimore,[2] in a Reform Jewish household.[3] Both his brother and an uncle became rabbis while his father was an ear-nose-and-throat doctor.[3]

Lieberman attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon where he majored in religion and studied pre-Biblical Canaanite languages.[3] After college he lived in Israel for a time where he married an Israeli woman, Alicia Friedman,[2] and had a son.[3] He took pre-med classes at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[2] Upon returning to the United States, Lieberman attended Johns Hopkins University[3] and became an ophthalmologist with a focus on glaucoma[3] with a practice in San Francisco.[2]

In 1982, Lieberman met Nancy Garfield at a yoga class and she introduced him to the Buddhist community of the Bay Area.[2] Lieberman and Garfield would eventually marry.[2]

Lieberman considered himself a Jubu[4] and was a leader in the lay Buddhist community in the Bay Area.[2]

When the Dalai Lama was going to visit the United States in 1989 he desired to learn more about Judaism.[2] A friend of Lieberman in the office of California Democratic Representative Tom Lantos reached out and asked Lieberman to assist.[2] Lieberman was instrumental in arranging an historic dialogue between Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama[4] putting together what he termed a "dream team" of rabbis and Jewish scholars for the one-day meeting.[2] The following year, Lieberman accompanied eight other members of the "dream team" to Dharmsala for a four-day discussion of the two faiths.[2][5] One member of the group, Rodger Kamenetz, went on to author The Jew in the Lotus about the discussions.[2]

Lieberman was also part of the group which invited monastics to found a monastery in California which eventually became Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery.[6]

In 1995, Lieberman founded the nonprofit Tibet Vision Project to help restore sight to Tibetans with blindness.[3] Lieberman traveled to Tibet twice a year to run mobile eye camps[7] and by 2005 had trained 20 Tibetan surgeons and restored sight to more than 2,000 people.[3] Within 20 years, the Tibet Vision Project had restored sight to over 5,000 people.[2]

In 2006, a documentary about his work entitled Visioning Tibet was released.[2]

On August 2, 2021, Lierberman died from prostate cancer.[6][2]