Divorcing

Susan Taubes (1928-1969) was born to a Jewish family in Hungary. The daughter of a psychoanalyst, Taubes emigrated to the US in 1939 and studied religion at Harvard. She married the philosopher and scholar Jacob Taubes and taught religion at Columbia University from 1960-69. She committed suicide in 1969, soon after the publication of Divorcing.

David Rieff is a writer and policy analyst. The son of Susan Sontag, he is the author of several books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. He has also written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Nation, and several other publications and teaches at the New School for Social Research.