Susan Taubes (born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann;^[1] 1928 – 6 November 1969) was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual.

Taubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) was the head of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest,^[2] and her father Sándor Feldmann (1889/90–1972) was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school,^[3] though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.^[4]

Taubes suffered during her life from the misogyny of the literary world.^[5] The critic Hugh Kenner, reviewing her book Divorcing in the New York Times, dismissed her as “a quick-change artist with the clothes of other writers.”^[6] Since her death, there has been a reappraisal of her work.^[7] In 2003, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, in Berlin, established a Taubes archive, describing her life as a “story in which Jewish exile meets female intellectualism.” An intellectual biography of Taubes by Christina Pareigis was published in 2020,^[8] and New York Review Books reissued Divorcing the same year, to appreciative reviews.^[9] In 2023, NYRB published Taubes’s novella “Lament for Julia” for the first time, along with nine short stories.

Biography

In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Bryn Mawr College^[1] and then earned her doctorate at Harvard. Her PhD thesis, The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,^[10] was supervised by Paul Tillich.^[11] Taubes subsequently published on philosophy and religion.^[11]

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

In the mid-1960s, she became 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 wrote her first novel, Divorcing, in 1969.

Taubes committed suicide shortly after the novel’s publication by drowning herself off Long Island in East Hampton.^[12] Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.^[13]

She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion.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, transferred to Berlin in 2001, where Sigrid Weigel established the Susan Taubes Archiv e.V. at the Berlin-based Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung/ZfL (Center for Literature and Culture Research).^[14][15] and, together with Christina Pareigis, worked on an edition of Taubes’ letters.

References

Further reading

The first major study of Susan Taubes's thought by Elliot R. Wolfson, The Philosophic Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023.