Susan Taubes


Susan Taubes was from a Jewish family in Hungary. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann was the head in Pest of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian Rabbianate, and her father Sándor Feldmann was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.

Biography

In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father. She studied at Harvard, wrote her Ph.D thesis on The Absent God. A Study of Simone Weil, 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 and Tania.
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 compiled "African Myths and Tales", published in New York in 1963 under her maiden name; and published her first novel Divorcing in 1969, but committed suicide shortly afterwards by drowning herself off Long Island. Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.
She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion.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.