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Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel
March 14, 2023 @ 5:15 pm - 6:15 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Susan Kahn in conversation with Thomas Laqueur
Rudolphina Menzel 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 thousands 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. In her new book Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel (Brandeis 2022), Susan Kahn brings to light an important piece of history.
Susan Martha Kahn is the Associate Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. 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. She received her BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley.
Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been focused on the history of popular religion and literacy; on the history the body— alive and dead; and on the history of death and memory. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Threepenny Review, among other journals and is a founding editor of Representations. Laqueur is a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton 2016) and he is now at work on a book called The Dog’s Gaze in Western Art that will be published by Princeton.