Prof. Dr. Susan Neiman is an American-German Jewish philosopher, cultural essayist, Enlightenment scholar, and international academic leader based in Potsdam, Germany. Since 2000, she has served as the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Her globally translated scholarship spans Kantian philosophy, the moral history of evil, and comparative studies of state remembrance (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Born in 1955 to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman was deeply shaped by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements during her youth. She pursued her higher education at Harvard University, studying under the towering moral and political philosophers John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, and earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1986. She subsequently served as an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and a Professor at Tel Aviv University before relocating permanently to Germany in 2000 to assume the directorship of the Einstein Forum.
Neiman’s philosophical legacy is anchored in defending universalist Enlightenment ethics against both reactionary tribalism and contemporary identity fractures. In her seminal 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, she constructed a comparative structural analysis of national reckoning, examining Germany’s postwar efforts to confront the legacy of the Holocaust alongside the United States’ systemic failure to process the historic trauma of slavery and the Confederacy.
In her book Left Is Not Woke, Neiman rigorously defended classical universalist humanism, arguing that true progressive thought must champion human dignity across all borders—a critique she applied both to condemn the indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza and to challenge the limits of modern identity-driven tribalism.
In October 2023, Neiman published a highly influential essay in The New York Review of Books analyzing the distortion of German memory politics. She maintained that Germany’s celebrated historical reckoning had rigidified into an exclusionary doctrine used by non-Jewish state functionaries to police, censor, and marginalize progressive international Jewish intellectuals who advocate for universal human rights and Palestinian self-determination.
Following state-led attempts to rescind cultural honors from journalists and artists like Masha Gessen, Neiman mobilized high-level institutional resistance. She co-authored and spearheaded international petitions warning that Germany’s administrative censorship was undermining the very constitutional values of Kunstfreiheit (artistic freedom) and democratic pluralism.