Dezember 2026

Susan Neiman is an internationally renowned philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic. She writes mainly on topics of moral philosophy, the enlightenment, and metaphysics and their impact on politics. 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. Among her most acclaimed publications are Left is Not Woke (2023), Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019) and Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2022). Susan Neiman was a 2025 Honorary Fellow at the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.  

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer, curator of public curiosity, and was the Founding Executive Director of Onassis Los Angeles. Prior he was Founder and Director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, including interviews with Patti Smith, Wes Anderson, Mike Tyson, Werner Herzog and many more. Before his tenure at the library, he was the Founder and Director of The Institute for Art & Cultures at the LACMA. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. In 2003, the French Government named him Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.