Susan Neiman: ‘I wanted to revive Jewish intellectual life in Germany, but now I don’t think they really want it’

It says a lot about the times we are living in that Susan Neiman sees Ireland, and her cottage near Cahirsiveen, as “one of the saner places in the world”.

The Atlanta-born philosopher learned her craft at Harvard and worked as professor at Yale and in Tel Aviv before moving to Berlin in 2000. A dominant field of her research and writing: the costs of confronting – and ignoring – the evils we humans do to each other.

After falling for Ireland 15 years ago, Neiman kept returning until she bought her cottage five years ago – giving her a new personal interest in the place.

“As someone fascinated by the ways people remember their past – even horrible past – it does seem to me the Irish have come out on a rather sane side,” she said, “by acknowledging a lot of the things that went wrong while still cherishing things that went right.”

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Neiman felt equally optimistic when she returned to Germany a quarter of a century ago, after studying here in the 1980s, to head Potsdam’s Einstein Forum, a research institute. She still holds that position.

As a secular, leftist Jewish intellectual, Neiman’s was a unique and welcomed voice in German discourse. But something has changed since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel. The debate here has been “depressing and eye-opening”, she says, and left her unsure if she still has a place here.

“I came back to Berlin thinking it would be great to revive Jewish intellectual life in Germany,” she says, “but now I realise: I don’t think they really want it.”

In no uncertain terms, and by all kinds of Germans, Neiman has been told in the last weeks and months that, in effect, she is the wrong kind of Jew.

Her criticisms of Israel’s decades-old occupation are not new. Nor are her warnings about the humanitarian cost of Israel’s Gaza offensive any different from mainstream views in Ireland, the US and elsewhere. But Germany – the land of the Holocaust – is not elsewhere. Opinion corridors that she says were already narrowing before October 7th have now calcified entirely, creating a McCarthyist atmosphere.

In a modern take on the red scare in 1950s America, Neiman says anyone like her who criticises Israel’s extremist government and its policies is obliged to prove that they are not, nor have they ever been, an anti-Semite.

Germans accusing Jews such as Neiman of being anti-Semitic? What sounds like an ironic joke is, in her through-the-looking-glass new reality, no laughing matter.

In our conversation, Prof Neiman is critical of extreme positions on all sides of the Middle East conflict and, at the outset, anxious to set aside terms such as pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli.

“It makes the whole conflict sound like football with my team and your team,” she says. “I am pro-human rights and speak out when human rights are being violated.”

Since when, then, has this been controversial?

Moving between Germany and Israel since the 1980s, Neiman observed shifts happening in their respective cultural narratives which, post-October 7th, are now at breaking point.

While living in Tel Aviv, she perceived efforts to shift the idea of Israeli identity in response to growing international criticism of its approach to the Palestinian territories.

“The foundation of Israel was not to present Israelis as victims, precisely the opposite,” she says. “The idea of playing on victimhood arose in the 1980s in response to fairly light criticism of its occupation – which we didn’t think would go on for so long.”

Around the same time in West Germany, she followed closely a heated debate over accepting moral responsibility for Nazi crimes, as well as political and historical debate over the scale and singularity of the Holocaust.

Neiman says this discourse was flattened and simplified in post-unification Germany and merged with growing Israeli sensitivity to criticism of its occupation.

In recent years, she argues, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the Nazi mass murder in its historical and political context without being accused of attempting to relativise German guilt for mass murder.

“The dominant view after German unification,” she says, “was ‘the Jews were our victims, it is our fault, it was the worst crime ever committed, and therefore we always have to stand on the side of ‘the Jews’'”.

Whether this is a wise approach, who “the Jews” in Germany actually are and who speaks on their behalf – these are all disputed questions. And in the last months, the battle over the answers to these questions has taken on an added urgency – and emotional heft.

The woke idea that has gotten around that Israelis are white and Palestinians are people of colour is ridiculous

The official representative organisation is the Central Council of Jews in Germany, founded in 1950. It is an Israel-aligned body that receives €22 million in state funding, with a raise of 69 per cent last year.,Critics argue the council represents only a minority of Jews in Germany, mostly orthodox and conservative.

“The people being treated as authentic Jewish voices in Germany are the voices who spend their lives as constantly constituted by the Holocaust, while those of us who do not spend our lives focused on victimhood are considered inauthentic,” argues Neiman, a dual German and Israeli citizen. “Yet all the Jews they miss most here in Germany – Moses Mendelssohn, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt – were universalists, none were nationalists.”

She agrees with a recent analysis, by German Middle East expert Muriel Asseburg, that German criticism of Israel and its occupation has grown increasingly muted as governments in Jerusalem have become more extreme.

“The Israeli embassy leans very, very hard on the German government, they are quite cynical about exploiting German sense of guilt and this has a real impact on actual policy,” says Neiman.

Instead of being challenged on her arguments, the philosopher says she has been subjected to personal attacks – including harassment and defamation – to discredit her as a person. The main lines of attack are, she says,: “I’m an American, I can’t understand, I am not genuinely Jewish”.

“What I notice, too,” she says, “is how they tend to go after Jewish women – not men.”

A final irony for Neiman is how critics lump her in with the boycott Israel efforts of the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) campaign.

Neiman says she disagrees with such boycotts but, fearing a chilling effect for Israel critics like herself, campaigned against a Bundestag resolution to label the BDS anti-Semitic.

What does she think of the popular colonial framing of the Middle East conflict? “Laziness of thinking.”

“These are awful times and I think people are taking comfort from tribalism: if I know what side I am on, then I don’t have to think for myself,” she says. “The problem with these people is they often know nothing about the Middle East conflict.”

More than half of Israel’s population come from Arab countries and are physically indistinguishable from Palestinians, she says, “so the woke idea that has gotten around that Israelis are white and Palestinians are people of colour is ridiculous”.

At the same time, she agrees that the risk of real anti-Semites masquerading as concerned Palestinian allies “is real and people have been attacked as a result”.

Her own children, she says, have encountered “knee-jerk anti-Semitism” since October 7th.

Plenty of material, it sounds like, for an updated paperback edition of her 2023 book Left is Not Woke.

Things are more awkward with her previous book, 2019′s Learning from the Germans, which argued that Germany’s approach to addressing its uniquely burdened past offered universal lessons for other countries. Today Neiman says this country’s coming to terms with its past was “much more simplistic and much less thoughtful than I had hoped in that book”.

[ Oliver Sears: Why are Jews around the world held to account for the actions of the Israeli government? ]

That said, Neiman is not the only one revising her views. German support for Israel is on the slide, with just 23 per cent in a recent poll supportive of the Gaza offensive if it means civilian casualties.

In conversation, Neiman mentions leading German politicians who, she says, hold very different views on Israel and Gaza to their public utterances. Disquiet is growing, too, inside government ministries on the official German line. For Neiman the public backlash in Germany is “already there and I think it is going to get worse”.

[ Is postmodernism to blame for our society losing its way? ]

This all matters, she argues, because Jerusalem depends hugely on Berlin’s support in the EU where, until recently “the attitude was ‘let the Germans decide’” on Israel.

“But we are seeing some differences of opinion lately,” says Prof Neiman, “and Ireland is probably the most outspoken.”

A year before she finishes up at the Einstein Forum, Neiman’s Kerry cottage is looking more attractive by the day.

“I am interested in having Ireland less as a refuge away from everything,” she says, “and more of a place where I can be involved in the intellectual and cultural life.”

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