Bring a dairy/pareve dish to share – Talk begins after services around noon
Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel
Rudolphina Menzel (née Waltuch, 1891–1973), was a Viennese-born, Jewish scientist whose pioneering research on canine psychology, development, and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Menzel was known throughout Europe as one of the foremost breeders and trainers of police dogs and served as a sought-after consultant at Kummersdorf, the German military dog training institute in Berlin. She was also a fervent Zionist who was responsible for inventing the canine infrastructure in what came to be the State of Israel and for training hundreds of dogs to protect Jewish lives and property in pre-state Palestine. Teaching Jews to like dogs and training dogs to serve Jews became Menzel’s unique kind of Zionist mission.
Susan Kahn is Associate Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. From 2003-2015 she served as Associate Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, Director of the Master’s Program in Middle Eastern Studies, and Lecturer in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; she received 14 Certificates of Excellence and Distinction in Teaching and was nominated for the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award. Her latest book Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel was published by Brandeis University Press in 2022. Her previous book Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel (Duke 2000) won a National Jewish Book Award, the Eileen Basker Prize for Outstanding Research in Gender and Health from the American Anthropological Association and the Musher Publication Prize, awarded biennially by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for the outstanding dissertation on Jewish life in Israel or America. She teaches a course on “The History of the Jewish People” at Harvard Extension School.