Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 25, 2026
By 1921, Albert Einstein was not only the most famous intellectual in the world; when he landed in the U.S. for the first time, thousands of people met his ship with a ticker tape parade. The mayor of New York gave him the key to the city; President Warren G. Harding invited him to the White House. It went on and on and on, in a sort of mass hysteria that was later compared to the reception of the Beatles, an adoration of his person which cannot be explained by his greatest achievement, the theory of general relativity—since very few people understand it. Later descriptions, including by most of his many admiring biographers portray him as a sad fool, whose interest in scanning the cosmos left him unable to deal with the world at his feet. Yet if that was the case, what was it about him that drew thousands of admirers, from Belgian queens to Princeton trash collectors? This talk will attempt to understand it, by a person who initially was impervious to Einstein’s charisma.
Susan Neiman has been director of the Einstein Forum since 2000, after working as a professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of ten books including The Unity of Reason (1994), Evil in Modern Thought (2002), Moral Clarity (2008), Why Grow Up? (2014), Learning from the Germans (2019), Left is not Woke (2023), and Call it Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (2026). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and other publications.
Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 25, 2026
By 1921, Albert Einstein was not only the most famous intellectual in the world; when he landed in the U.S. for the first time, thousands of people met his ship with a ticker tape parade. The mayor of New York gave him the key to the city; President Warren G. Harding invited him to the White House. It went on and on and on, in a sort of mass hysteria that was later compared to the reception of the Beatles, an adoration of his person which cannot be explained by his greatest achievement, the theory of general relativity—since very few people understand it. Later descriptions, including by most of his many admiring biographers portray him as a sad fool, whose interest in scanning the cosmos left him unable to deal with the world at his feet. Yet if that was the case, what was it about him that drew thousands of admirers, from Belgian queens to Princeton trash collectors? This talk will attempt to understand it, by a person who initially was impervious to Einstein’s charisma.
Susan Neiman has been director of the Einstein Forum since 2000, after working as a professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of ten books including The Unity of Reason (1994), Evil in Modern Thought (2002), Moral Clarity (2008), Why Grow Up? (2014), Learning from the Germans (2019), Left is not Woke (2023), and Call it Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (2026). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and other publications.
