Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman was born on March 27, 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia, into a Jewish family. She dropped out of high school at fourteen to join the anti-Vietnam War movement, and her interest in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre drew her toward philosophy. Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her BA in 1977 and her PhD in 1986 under the supervision of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, and spent several years of her graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin.

She was an assistant and associate professor of philosophy at Yale University from 1989 to 1996, and then taught at Tel Aviv University until 2000. Since 2000 she has served as director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, where she has become a prominent public intellectual.

Neiman has written across moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and the history of modern philosophy. Her book "Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy" (2002), which traces a path from the Lisbon earthquake to Auschwitz, reorients the history of modern philosophy around the problem of evil. Her other works include "Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin" (1992), "The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant" (1994), "Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists" (2008), "Why Grow Up?" (2014), "Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil" (2019), and "Left Is Not Woke" (2023).

In her most recent book, drawing on the legacy of the Enlightenment and defending universalism, progress, and the distinction between justice and power, Neiman offers a pointed critique of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, arguing that parts of the contemporary left, by abandoning these Enlightenment ideals, have drifted toward tribal identity politics and skepticism about the very idea of progress. She also writes regularly for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Die Zeit.