Every year aroundHanukkah , eminent scholars don their courtly academic robes and convene at the University of Chicago ( or on Zoom ) to present their argument on the most important question of our clock time : latke or hamentash ?
The hamentash is a triangular pastry with a sweet woof served during the Jewish holiday of Purim . The potato pancake , of row , is the fried Irish potato pancake eat during Hanukkah . The merits and drawbacks of each have been passionately exposit upon since the first Latke - Hamentash Debate agree in 1946 . Therules of the debate , consort to Ruth Fredman Cernea in the introduction to her bookThe Great Latke - Hamentash Debate , are that " all participants must hold a Ph.D. or equivalent arcdegree ; arguments should be framed according to the theoretical place and jargon of the participant ’s donnish discipline ; and each symposium must admit someone who is not Jewish — to lend a note of ' gentility . ' "
The tradition of thelatke - hamentash debatehas since unfold to other universities . Nobel Prize winner and MacArthur " Genius " associate alike have harbour forth on the metaphysical , philosophic , semiotic , sociological , literary , and historical implications of latkeness vs. hamentashness . In solemnisation of Hanukkah , here are eight heavy arguments ( one for each night ) from premature Latke - Hamentash Debates .
1. From “Latkes, Hamentashen, and the History of Science”
" How else was Kepler capable to get at the ellipsoidal shape of the range of the planets around the Dominicus but by thoughtfulness of the appearance of the well - falsify potato pancake ? How else to account for the decrease of the dynamism of Italian science in the late Renaissance but by the displacement of the latke by alimentary paste and its subsequent degeneration to bare gnocchi ? Can one believe that the crepuscule of an Malus pumila is sufficiently inspire to direct Newton to the theory of oecumenical gravitational attraction ? But the slither of a potato pancake to the floor as one attempts to cut it : that is idea - molest in the extreme point . Would thatNewtoncould have admitted the truth . “—physicist Morrel H. Cohen
2. From “Notes toward a Reinterpretation of American Literature”
" In the famous chapter 43 , entitled ' The Whiteness of the Whale,‘Melvilleconfronts us with the fundamental and profound duality of the monstrous creature . Is the innocence a symbol of virtue and goodness , or is it the emblem of brat and evil ? Is the heavyweight a three - dimensional latke , billow in its jumbo and blubbery circularity , body forward the benign and virtuous look of nature ? Or is the whale a gigantic hamantash , tapering from its monumental triangular mind to its rump quintuplet , and substantiate the darkness , the malevolence , the wickedness in the population ? Ahab make the whale for a hamantash , and carries his ship and work party with him to destruction . “—Marvin Mirsky , professor of humanistic discipline
3. From “Freedom, Latkes, and American Letters: An Original Contribution to Knowledge”
" As anyone who has read Fredrick Jackson Turner get laid , the seed of American popular establishment were planted on the frontier . And as any student of American history knows , the frontier was a place where the simplest and stark instrument of life had to do double duty . In cookery , the simple frying pan was the pioneer ’s first resource ; the axe , rifle , and frying pan were the weapons in the seduction of the wilderness . And what kind of beauty do we make in a fry goat god ? I assure you , it is not the high - price confection . That take an oven — a more complicated patch of engineering — to say nothing of such exotic , un - American , and civilised ingredients as prune or poppy seeds . " — historian Bernard Weisberger
4. From “The Apotheosis of the Latke”
" Let us get down with Plato . It is not generally known that Plato ’s immortal authorship , today called ' dialogues , ' were in the first place squall ' dialatkes . ' They were so called , of course , because they provided such a well - rounded , succulent noetic banquet . It was Plato ’s writing of dialatkes that give his whole philatkophy its fertile and yeasty flavor , both ghostlike and crude . It is even less well known that Plato ’s majuscule school-age child , nowadays called Aristotle , was in the first place name ' Aristlatke , ' from the Grecian parole ' aristos , ' meaning ' best , ' and ' potato pancake . ' In other words , Aristlatke was so called because he was the best of all potato pancake - feeder who participate in Plato ’s dialatkes . “—philosopher Alan Gewirth
5. From “The Scientific Method”
" deplorably , the quark complex body part of latkes and hamantashen has received precious little attention from scientist . This is due , no dubiousness , to the shocking province of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy budgets . What I will unveil now is the synopsis for a sound scientific computer programme to take the latke / hamatash quark construction . This programme is courageous in scope , bluff in imagination , and , I am most proud to say , damn expensive … This Modern political machine , the Superconducting Super Hamalatkatron , or SSH for short , can be constructed at the meek cost of 8.264 billion dollars , a price which include tax , tip , and dealer prep … The food would be accelerated to mellow energy using the unmarried strongest force known , the force of guilt . “—astrophysicist Edward Kolb
6. From “Euripides’ The Cooks of Troy: Hecuba’s Lament”
" Up , unhappy head , up from the debris . This is no longer Troy . And I , Hecuba , was the chief cook of Troy . Now we are routed by the Greek onslaughtthat laid emaciate the glisten kitchen of the kings.—Greeks covetously pig out on my cakes(both the circular cakes and the dulcet pointed cakes)with a overeating that knew no moderation . Alas , the battle of the kitchen lose . Alas , my ruined majestic garment . Yield to fortune , yield to pour forth dishwater . Don’t hold life ’s prow against the swell tide of food waste . “—philosopher Martha Nussbaum
7. From “Heartburn as a Cultural System”
" The enigma of the potato pancake and the homntash can never be ' lick ' as such , as it were , until these two are watch as gustemes of a gustemic poesy of medicine that is full of sound and fury — at least of prune fill — but that signifies nothing if not learn in its textual plenitude , which we must deconstruct before we can digest . With all due esteem to my learned co-worker here tack , argue over the anteriority of design , or using external criteria of Charles Frederick Worth , are clearly just the most immanent and unlikely of partisan strategies . No , once you ’ve caught a codification , you ’ve appropriate the germ of the system of symbolization , only in terms of which can any symbolic representation ’s significance be understood . It is an eatable system of logic of — if you ’re not careful with the dough — the concrete . “—anthropologist Michael Silverstein
8. From “Restoring the Jewish Canon”
" What is bad is not that the economists say that mancanlive on latkes or hamentashen alone , but that they are crude materialists , not interpret the unequaled Jewish blending of affair and spirit in them which defies economists ' categories . They consider that consumer preference should determine the value of these sacred object , repeat Locke ’s error that labor is the author of value . They retrieve that there are right price of equivalence between latkes and , say , pizza pie . Survival , bodily motivation , is all they know — as though anyone who was concerned in health would feed Judaic intellectual nourishment … Practically , the first matter to be done is to dispatch this debate from the control of the Manischewitz heretic and their agents , the Business School , and return it to the philosopher - kings ; for only when sapience and potato pancake - hamantash coincide will evils cease . “—philosopher Allan Bloom
A version of this story ran in 2012 ; it has been updated for 2021 .
