Susan Taubes

In 1939, Susan Feldmann emigrated to the United States with her father (but without her mother, Marion Batory). She studied at Harvard, wrote her PhD thesis on The Absent God. A Study of Simone Weil,[5] supervised by Paul Tillich, and published on philosophy and religion.[6]

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 compiled "African Myths and Tales," published in New York in 1963 under her maiden name, and published her first novel, Divorcing, in 1969. Taubes committed suicide shortly after publication by drowning herself off Long Island.[7] Her body was identified by Susan Sontag.[8]

She left numerous literary texts, most of them unpublished, as well as years of correspondence with Jacob Taubes and other prominent figures of philosophy and religion.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).[9][10] and, together with Christina Pareigis, worked on an edition of Susan Taubes’ Schriften. In 2021 Pareigis published Susan Taubes’ intellectual biography.[11]