Latke versus Hamantasch
SHTEIR, RACHEL
Culture Watching LATKE VERSUS HAMANTASCH By Rachel Shteir One night a few weeks ago in the cavernous ballroom of the American Jewish League on East 59th Street, Ted Cohen, a philosophy...
...I now agree with Cohen, who says that Latke v. Hamantasch (affectionately dubbed "L v. H" by debater emeritus Milton Friedman) captures the best of Chicago, its Midwestern iconoclasm and roil...
...Someone got Cohen a (paradoxically) round hamantasch from the buffet table...
...Rachel Shteir, a new NL contributor, takes no side on the question at hand...
...Amenitywise, the school takes its cues from the City of Big Shoulders, Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren...
...Using hermeneutics, we can know that the hamantasch is represented by these triangular tokens," Roth said, waving at a screen displaying clay tablets with cuneiform on them...
...John Updike once said that Harvard taught him how to be a gentleman...
...next, apparently switching sides, he showed slides that made a prune cookie look like a Paramecium...
...Since he had already participated nine times at the U. of C.— where, 50 years ago, a rabbi and two professors gave birth to the famous exchange—Cohen knew his role as well as he knew, say, Kant and Rousseau...
...Hamantaschen, asserted Roth, who was wearing a long white robe and a paper tiara, appear in the first pictograms known to man, whereas the first records of latkes came much, much, much later...
...But they're the exception...
...Some early arguments, like that of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, are lost...
...The late Allan Bloom anticipated his Closing of the American Mind by lamenting somewhat pretentiously that "the debate has fallen into disarray...
...I myself graduated from the University of Chicago, but to me latkes were always crusty potato pancakes eaten at Chanukkah, and hamantaschen were simply triangular prune cookies served in celebration of Purim...
...the philosophy professor showed no surprise when, at the count, it turned out that hamantaschen had won...
...It makes up for that in the classroom, in the required year-long sequences with civically correct names like "Human Being and Citizen...
...Culture Watching LATKE VERSUS HAMANTASCH By Rachel Shteir One night a few weeks ago in the cavernous ballroom of the American Jewish League on East 59th Street, Ted Cohen, a philosophy professor from the University of Chicago, stepped up to the podium and quipped: "I am the president of the American Society of Noshing and Schlepping...
...Edward "Rocky" Kolb, the first speaker, a dark, dashing astrophysicist, launched a "pox on both your pastries" argument that segued into a complaint that the last five decades of debate had been the "inexact" work of humanists...
...Soon his tender bipartisanship became fully apparent: "The hamantasch has the grace of a trilobite," Shapiro said, and then he revealed a sight worthy of any dime store museum: a slide of what he described as "hamantasch mating...
...The U. of C. is not exactly known for school spirit, and while there I disdained most university-sponsored events...
...The podium was flanked by flags emblazoned with the words latke and hamantasch...
...By the time Cohen introduced the molecular biologist Jim Shapiro, L v. H had pitched itself into frenzy...
...Still, 10 years out, I suppose I've begun to grow nostalgic...
...Shapiro began by calling latkes "deplorable...
...Unmoored from Hyde Park, L v. H seemed a little lost, though undiminished in charm...
...Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman's argument turned on subatomic particles...
...The elfin Cohen was in New York to emcee the inaugural East Coast latkehamantasch debate...
...Two piled on a china plate...
...Chicago, though, is no Harvard...
...Kolb had it all wrong, said the red-haired Martha Roth—an Assyrian expert at the Oriental Institute...
...Of course, there are those who declined to debate, among them Saul Bellow and medical ethicist Leon Kass...
...Next, one of the "inexact" stepped up to prove that L v. H could contain precision after all...
...Last fall, the event filled a 900-seat auditorium, and it has also proved popular as an alumni fund-raising stunt...
...During the voting afterward, Cohen wondered aloud why no one had argued for the potato pancake this year...
...Two hundred and fifty Chicago alumni burst into applause...
...With impeccable timing, Roth flirted with the crowd: "Since you went to the University, you can read cuneiform," she said, sending up Chicago's reputation as a "grind school...
...But former U. of C. President Hanna Gray is there, claiming proof that Machiavelli ate latkes and was therefore a Jew...
...others on Wagner's Ring Cycle or Marx...
...The L v. H archives yield an engaging history of American letters...
...No record exists of an apocryphal debate between Hans Morgenthau and Bruno Bettelheim...
...Loud laughter, whistles, hooting...
...nay, desuetude...
...For the past half-century its erudite faculty have been trying to outdazzle one another with arguments for the superiority of different foodstuffs...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
