Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin

by Susan Neiman

Peter folded an easel in the corner to make a table. He brought cold cuts and bread and asked me what I thought of his paintings. Later I would learn that people here always ask you what you think of their paintings, and that it's wrong just to say you find them interesting, but perfectly alright to say you find them awful.
. . . You come from a Jewish family, don't you?" asked Peter. "Yes," I said.
"It doesn't matter," said the other painter. Doesn't matter? To whom?
~

Berlin—"East" and "West," day and of course night—through the 1980s before the Wall came down. In the eyes of a U.S. philosophy student. And Jewish, which makes for moments awkward, poignant, resonant, unspoken, crass, funny, and always lurking.

Most of all, Susan Neiman—later a philosophy professor at Yale and Tel Aviv University, now the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam—can surely write, as borne out again by her books to follow this debut. We live the Reagan years with her when a city was divided, America the occupier, and the cigarettes not named Salem because it sounds too Jewish.

Neiman is also the author of "Evil in Modern Thought" and "The Unity of Rereading Kant." She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard and studied Kant at the Free University of Berlin. Her 2008 book "Moral Clarity" was named to the New York Times "100 Notable Books" list. "Slow Fire," originally published by Schocken in 1992, is now available in Kindle format and a new softcover edition from Quid Pro Books, and still resonates today.

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 10, 1992

About the author

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher and essayist, her main interests are in the history of philosophy and morality, and the philosophy of politics and religion.