Susan Taubes (born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann, 12 January 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 Neolog branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest,[1] and her father, Sándor Feldmann (–1972), was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school,[2] though the two had a falling out in 1923.[3]
The misogyny of the literary field during her lifetime caused Taubes suffering.[4] The literary critic Hugh Kenner, reviewing her book Divorcing in the New York Times on November 2, 1969, dismissed her as one of the "lady novelists" and “a quick-change artist with the clothes of other writers.”[5] Taubes drowned four days after Kenner's review was published, and a reappraisal of her work began.[6] In 2003, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Germany, established an archive for Taubes's work, 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,[7] and the New York Review of Books reissued Divorcing the same year to appreciative reviews.[8] In 2023, the New York Review of Books published Taubes’s novella Lament for Julia for the first time in addition to nine short stories.
In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Bryn Mawr College[9] and then earned her doctorate at Harvard. Her PhD thesis, The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,[10] was supervised by Paul Tillich. 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. Taubes was 41 years old.[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She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion.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, and 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] Weigel, together with Christina Pareigis, worked on an edition of Taubes’ letters.
In 2024, Atlantic Magazine included Divorcing in its list of "The Great American Novels," describing it as a "rediscovered masterpiece, a raw, witty, and utterly original novel."[16]
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.