Susan Neiman, born in Atlanta, Georgia, is a globally renowned philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic. She writes mainly on topics of moral philosophy, the Enlightenment, and metaphysics and their impact on politics. In her latest book, she takes a critical look at the phenomenon of wokeness in the left-liberal milieu. Before becoming director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam in 2000, she was Professor of Philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv Universities. Neiman has always been politically active: As a teenager, she protested U.S. Vietnam War policies and more recently the Bush administration’s Iraq war, and she worked as a campaign aide for Barack Obama. Her philosophically grounded call for moral clarity aims to make traditional notions of morality productive for left-liberal thought and action.


Selected Awards

2024 | Bruno Kreisky Preis für das politisches Buch
2022 | Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Cambridge
2022 | Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh
2021 | August Bebel Award
2014 | Spinoza Prize
2010 | Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan


Selected Publications

2023 | Left is Not Woke. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2019 | Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2014 | Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. London: Penguin.
2008 | Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
2002 | Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.