Susan Neiman

"[On members of the Nazi Party] [T]he most shocking, but also important thing, is they were not the uneducated masses. The majority had academic degrees. We like to think that education provides immunity to racist and fascist ideology. And it doesnt."

"Whenever you say anything good about East Germany [...] immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you’re a Stalinist..." Im not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did."

"How do we remember the parts of our histories wed rather forget? Repression and revision are always options."

"Theres no question that the right-wing campaign to ban from American classrooms anything that might cause discomfort is dangerous. Anyone should be proud to belong to a nation whose heroes include Martin Luther King Jr. and Toni Morrison, two writers whom several school boards have banned. Along with a history of profound injustice, the United States has a long history of people who fought against it. Without examples of brave men and women who worked together to make progress toward justice, we will never have the will to make more. Those who cannot acknowledge past histories of progress are doomed to cynicism or resignation. Portraying all of American history as an engine of white supremacy, or all of German history as irrevocably poisoned by antisemitism, is bound to provoke backlash, and it already has. But even if it didnt, it wouldnt be true—and isnt the demand for historical reckoning itself a demand for truth?"

"Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them. The more I learned, the more I grew convinced of the opposite: the history of philosophy was indeed animated by the questions that drew us there."

"However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham’s unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths."

"Far less import than your belief of whether god exists is what you think your belief entails. Does it direct your behaviour by rules and commandments that are set out before you or does it require you to think them through yourself? Does it require you to try to make sense of the world, or does it give up on sense itself? And I think these are the crucial distinctions. Not whether you add belief in a god to them."

"Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around."

"I was part of the national German committee to plan celebrations for the 2005 Einstein Year. One hundred years after Einstein made his most famous discoveries, the left-leaning government had decided to spend 20 million euros to show its support of science in general and of left-wing cosmopolitan (ahem!) intellectuals in particular. As the only Jew on the committee, my main function would be as what Orthodox Jews call a mashgiach—someone who guarantees that the premises are kosher. There were exhibits, there were banners, there were lectures, and more. What if they made a mistake? I spotted one in an early brochure, where Einstein was described as a "fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-background." Did the committee know, I asked, that Einstein had expressly ridiculed that weird circumlocution? "He just called himself a Jew," I said. "Jews dont consider the word insulting." "Is that so, Frau Neiman?" replied the minister of science. She was flustered. "That’s very helpful, just the sort of thing we need to know." Jew in German has two syllables, not one, and I suppose that buried deep in some dreams are memories of sinister mobs shouting Ju-dah! Ju-dah! Perhaps even for atheists, echoes of Judas Iscariot play a role. Germans use phrases with nine syllables, like fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-extraction or fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-heritage, in order to avoid using the obvious two. The habit is so engrained that despite my objection, the second draft of the brochure used the same phrase. "I know we all have many duties here," I said at the next meeting. "But perhaps it has been forgotten that I mentioned that Einstein didnt like this designation. He made fun of it several times." I was learning to use certain forms of polite circumlocution myself. "Of course," said the minister’s deputy. "We’ll see it gets changed." They never did; too many nightmares worked against them."

"Those who cannot find [moral clarity] are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead."

"What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress."

"Where the account goes awfully wrong is in the musings on East Germany, where Neiman is prone to accepting the GDR’s self-serving use of its "anti-fascist" badging at a face value it never merited, despite the good faith of many cultural figures in the idea. East Germany was sired by Stalinism. Former Nazis were allowed to take "useful" positions in the state apparatus. When I worked with Markus Wolf, the former head of East German intelligence, on his memoirs, his admission that most shocked me was that the east had, at one point, tacitly supported neo-Nazi demonstrations in the west, perversely in order to demonstrate the revival of fascism in the Federal Republic."