Call it Evil. Understanding the Trump Era

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics.
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Civil Rights Movement, Neiman dropped out of high school to join American activists working for peace and justice. Later she studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in 1986. In the 80s she spent six years in Berlin, studying at the Free University and working as a freelance writer. She was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University.
In 2000 she assumed her current position as director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She is the author of ten books, translated into 15 languages, which have won prizes from, among others, PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and many other publications. Neiman is the mother of three grown children; she lives in Berlin.

Sabine von Mering is Professor of German and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University where she directs the Center for German and European Studies and hosts the popular CGES Online Webinar series, promoting transatlantic dialogue. She has co-edited seven books, including Russian-Jewish Emigration after the Cold War: Perspectives from Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States with Olaf Gloeckner and Evgenija Garbolevsky (2006), Right-Wing Radicalism Today: Perspectives from Europe and the US with Timothy Wyman-McCarty (2013), and Antisemitism on Social Media with Monika Hübscher (2022, German 2024), The Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism (2025) and a special issue for German Politics and Society entitled Cultures of Climate Action in Germany (2026). She also translated Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning’s Beginning to End the Climate Crisis. A History of Our Future (2023) The mother of two grown sons, von Mering lives in Wayland and is active in the climate movement 350Mass. A 2023 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, her opeds are available at https://wecanstopclimatechange.com/