Susan Taubes

Susan Taubes, née Feldmann (born 1928 in Budapest, died 6 November 1969 in East Hampton) was from a Jewish family in Hungary. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) was Chief Rabbi of Budapest,^[1] and her father Sándor Feldmann (1889/90–1972) was a psychoanalyst^[2] of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.^[3]

In 1939, Susan Feldman emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Harvard, wrote her Ph.D thesis on The Absent God. A Study of Simone Weil,^[4] supervised by Paul Tillich.

She was the first wife of the philosopher and Judaist scholar Jacob Taubes. The couple both taught religion at Columbia University 1960-1969. They had two children: Ethan (b. 1953) and Tania (b. 1956).

In the mid-1960s, she became also involved in literature and the stage: she was a member of The Open Theatre and in a group of writers around Susan Sontag.

She published her first novel Divorcing in 1969, but committed suicide shortly afterwards by drowning herself off Long Island.^[5] Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.^[6]

She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion. Most of this estate was discovered years after her death and edited by the Berlin-based Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung/ZfL (Center for Literature and Culture Research).^[7]

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