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Susan Neiman
Born	(1955-03-27) March 27, 1955 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Education
Alma mater	Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Stanley Cavell John Rawls
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Institutions	Yale University Tel Aviv University
Main interests	Morality · History of philosophy · Political philosophy · Philosophy of religion
Notable ideas	Criticism of woke politics from the left

Susan Neiman (/ˈnaɪmən/; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Biography

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school to join the anti-Vietnam War movement. Later, she studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. During graduate school, she spent several years of study at the Free University of Berlin between 1982 and 1988. Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in 1980s Berlin, was published in 1992. From 1989 to 1996, she was an assistant and associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, and from 1996 to 2000 she was an associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she assumed her current position at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She is the mother of three adult children.

Neiman has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, and a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. Her books have won prizes from PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, and Dissent. In Germany, she has written for Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Freitag, among other publications.

Major works

Learning from the Germans

Main article: Learning from the Germans

Her 2019 book Learning from the Germans examines German efforts to atone for Nazi atrocities and identifies lessons for how the U.S. might come to terms with its legacy of slavery and racism. The book brings together historical and philosophical analysis; interviews with politicians, activists, and contemporary witnesses in Germany and the United States; and Neiman's own first-person observations as a white woman growing up in the South and a Jewish woman who has lived for almost three decades in Berlin. After the book appeared, developments in Germany led Neiman to change some of her views.

Left Is Not Woke

In Left Is Not Woke, Neiman examines the assumptions behind "woke" politics and argues that they are at odds with what the left has always stood for: "universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress". She is particularly concerned that "tribalism" will undermine the left's political goals and leave it without the tools to oppose the far right, whose outlook has always been tribalist. Neiman traces woke thinking back to Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and the thinkers they influenced, although she also finds similar views articulated by the character of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic.

In a review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke characterized Left Is Not Woke as a "cringe-inducing screed against a group she terms 'the woke'—without ever telling us whom, exactly, she is talking about", and that is "chock full of ad hominem attacks and ungenerous readings". The book has also received positive reviews, including in Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Political Quarterly. In his review for The New York Review of Books, the Irish journalist and essayist Fintan O'Toole writes, "Neiman’s short, punchy, and brilliantly articulated argument is essentially a call for those who regard themselves as being on the left to remember the distinction between skepticism and cynicism. The first is crucial to a progressive critique of untamed capitalism. It demands a constant critical awareness of how power and self-interest wrap themselves in virtue, 'common sense', and high ideals."

Awards and honors

In 2014, Neiman was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen. She delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Michigan in 2010. In 2018, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, and received the Lucius D. Clay Medal for her contributions to German-American relations. She served as the Gifford Lecturer for 2021–2022 at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, she was awarded the August Bebel Prize of the German Social Democratic Party, and in 2023 she received the Order of Merit of Brandenburg. She is also a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Selected bibliography

Books

• Left Is Not Woke, Polity, 2023.
• Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
• Widerstand der Vernunft: Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten, Ecowin, 2017.
• Why Grow Up?, Penguin, 2014 (part of the series Philosophy in Transit). [Reprinted as Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015.]
• Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Harcourt, 2008.
• Fremde sehen anders: Zur Lage der Bundesrepublik, Suhrkamp, 2005.
• Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2002.
• The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, Schocken, 1992.

Articles and book chapters

• "Why Trump Is Threatened by South Africa," The Nation, Mar. 14, 2025
• "Fanon the Universalist," The New York Review of Books, Jun. 6, 2024
• "Germany on Edge," The New York Review of Books, Nov. 3, 2023
• "Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire," The New York Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2023
• “Corona as Chance: Overcoming the Tyranny of Self-Interest,” in Kahn and Maduro, eds., Democracy in Times of Pandemic, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
• "Understanding the Problem of Evil" in Chignell, ed., Evil: Oxford Philosophical Concepts, Oxford University Press, 2019.
• "A Dialogue Between Business and Philosophy" (with Bertrand Collomb) in Rangan, ed., Capitalism Beyond Mutuality? Perspectives Integrating Philosophy and Social Science, Oxford University Press, 2018.
• "Amerikanische Träume," in Honneth, Kemper, and Klein, ed., Bob Dylan, Suhrkamp, 2017.
• "Ideas of Reason," in Rangan, ed., Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society, Oxford University Press, 2015.
• "Forgetting Hiroshima, Remembering Auschwitz: Tales of Two Exhibits," Thesis Eleven, 129(1), 2015: 7–26.
• "Victims and Heroes," in Matheson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Utah Press, 2012.
• "Subversive Einstein," in Galison, Holton and Schweber, ed., Einstein for the 21st Century, Princeton University Press, 2008.

External links

• Official Website Provides biography along with publications and appearances.
• Einstein Forum Profile
• Appearances on C-SPAN