Syuzen Taubes

Susan Taubes (born Judith Zsuzsanna Feldmann) was a Hungarian-American writer, philosopher, and scholar of religion.

Susan was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather, Moses Feldmann (1860–1927), was the head of the Neolog division of the divided Hungarian rabbinical authority in Pest, and her father, Sándor Feldmann (c. 1889–1972), was a psychoanalyst of the Sándor Ferenczi school.

In 1939, Susan and her father (without her mother) emigrated to the United States. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and later received her doctorate from Harvard. Her dissertation was titled "The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil," and Taubes later published the book "Philosophy and Religion."

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

In the mid-1960s, Susan became interested in literature and the stage: she was a member of the Open Theater and of the writers' group around Susan Sontag. She compiled African myths and tales, published in New York in 1963 under her maiden name. In 1969, Taubes wrote her first novel, "Divorce." This experimental prose work had long been forgotten until recently.

In 2024, The Atlantic included "Divorce" in its list of "Great American Novels," describing it as "a rediscovered masterpiece, a raw, witty, and utterly original novel." The novel was highly praised by Samuel Beckett and Susan Sontag.

A few days after the publication of the novel "Divorce," Taubes died by suicide, drowning off the coast of Long Island in East Hampton. The writer was 41 years old.