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["zodiac”][originally performed by yaron hadad] [acapella beatbox] al hashor, al hakeshetal hagdi mehumah al aryeh, al maznaimal hadli milchamah al dagim krav bishnaimlevanah bechamah betulah mista'eretal talah vesartan te'umim bamachteretim akrav mesukan esh bashamayim shalhevet me'alnoga vetzedek tov'im bechalal zodiak sovev, mistovev hagalgalmehumah

kach omnam, ben adammistovev ba'olam bli kochav, bli mazalme'eifoh le'i sham mi ani sham balaylahshe'etse el hakrav? lo ani sham balaylahshe'epol kmo kochav esh bashamayimesh bashamayim esh [applause] speaker 1: thankyou all so much. my name is derek i amthe president of rhythm

and jews this year. and well, it's been ahuge quarter for us. we've got a bunchof new members. raise your hands, kids. aren't they adorable? i love them. we've also just releasedan album last spring. you can check that outon spotify, itunes, and any other musicdistribution platforms

you kids use these days. otherwise, if youlike our sound you can catch us here againat the icca quarterfinals, this very stage, in the winter. acca-fans over there. otherwise, we got onemore song for you tonight and we hope youenjoy the debate. [music - jeff richmond & tracy morgan, "werewolf bar mitzvah"] look up at the sky!it's a full moon on the sabbath

this is scary “woof”here’s my tale i was working late on my haftorahwhen i heard a knock on my bedroom-doorah i opened it up and to my surprisethere was a werewolf standing there with glowing gold eyes he says tomorrow my son, you will be a manbut tonight's the time to join the wolfen clan tomorrow you will stand at the bimah and praybut tonight let's gaze at the moon and bay wooooooo werewolf bar mitzvahspooky scary boys becoming menmen becoming wolves [deep laughing]

the next day what happenedthe talmud didn't teach i got up in front of everyoneto give my little speech then my teeth turned into fangsand my nails into claws and i nearly dropped the torahwhen my hands turned into paws i growled and i roaredand my rabbi did as well it was a rocking werewolf zooat temple beth-emmanuel at my werewolf bar mitzvahspooky scary spooky scary skeletonsshivers down your spine we had a reception at the larchmont country club

they served a real nice brisket and an eight foot party sub i danced with my cousins, i got money from my folks we had a lot of fun telling circumcision jokes but the country club employees were brain sucking pack who had all turned into zombies and were on the attack so we fought them and some dracula's and frankensteins too 'cause you gotta love bar mitzvah, even if you're not a, "arooooooo" werewolf bar mitzvahsspooky scary nice jewish boys gowoof woof woof

werewolf bar mitzvahkooky hairy men becoming wolves [music playing - "pomp and circumstance"] [music playing] anna levin rosen: goodevening and welcome everyone. my name is anna levin rosen. i'm the rabbi and the executivedirector at the university of chicago hillel. anna levin rosen: and i'mexcited to welcome you

to the seventieth annuallatke hamantash debate. anna levin rosen: yes,you heard that correctly. 70 years. what a long time forsuch a silly tradition. how did it last? how did you manage to survive solong at an esteemed university like universityof chicago, which is known for much seriousnessand rigorous inquiry? well, let's start at the verybeginning, the untold story.

it was 1946, andthe first debate was divisive and vitriolicin the hillel house. latke and hamantash werelocked in angry debate, and then their eyes locked. and they stole away upstairs torabbi [? pakarski's ?] office on the second floor ofthe hillel building. and standing by the largeoak desk in the moonlight, they were married. married, you say.

that's impossible. no, it's not. [laughter] anna levin rosen: how could twoseemingly polarized individuals marry when the debatecontinues raging on? in 1946, we were more concernedwith coming together rather than creating divisionsin our community. latke and hamantash knew that,despite their differences and the disapproval oftheir friends and family,

they were meant to be together. so they decided tokeep their marriage a secret as they both setoff to pursue doctorates in their respective fields. they knew that thenews of their matrimony would cause no end ofgrief and consternation in their families,so they decided to keep their elopementin the shadows but keep the debateraging each autumn.

as you might imagine, thiswas not an easy arrangement to maintain given the stressthat two working academics undergo, working academicswith opposite points of view. latke and hamantashfound valuable mentors and learned a lessonof how to stay together in 1968, when theyattended a rally-- a peace rally-- in washington, d.c. it was there that they met anelderly couple, gefiltefish and matzah ball, who had asimilar star crossed lover

vibe in their relationship. gefilte and matzah balltold latke and hamantash to keep their argumentscentralized to one debate a year. and with this practice in place,the latke and the hamantash were able to maintaintheir loving relationship throughout the yearwith minimal animosity. they were able to save theirblowout arguments confined to the month of november.

the latke and the hamantashkept up the debate tradition without a hitchuntil the 1980s, when hamantash's successfulacademic career began to surpass that of latke. in 1989, hamantash wasawarded an honorary doctorate from the university ofchicago in recognition of her advancedwork in the theory of international astroparticlebiochemical physics of jewish foods.

anna levin rosen:meanwhile latke served as an untenuredadjunct faculty in the applied studies ofinternational astroparticle biochemical physics. latke was initially enviousof hamantash's career success. he wanted to be the primaryoil winner in the family. but eventually he cameto take much pride in taking care of the babypotato knishes at home. so by now you'reprobably wondering,

why are you disclosing allof this at this moment? latke and hamantashhave managed to keep this a secret for 70 years. this is true. but they asked me toshare their story with you tonight in honor of theirplatinum anniversary. we live in stressful,busy, bustling times in an ever-changing world. and it's important to recognizeexamples in real life,

such as that oflatke and hamantash, where people withdivergent opinions still manage to love each other. but more than that, thelove is strengthened by the annual traditional debatefull of academically rigorous, strategic, andwell-researched arguments. with that said, ladiesand gentlemen, all of you, i urge you to keep an openmind and a loving heart to the argumentspresented tonight.

sit back, relax, andenjoy the debate. hal weitzman: esteemedguests, colleagues, friends, those of you whoare neither esteemed nor my colleaguesnor my friends, welcome to the 70th annuallatke hamantash debate at the university of chicago. this is the originallatke hamantash debate and it is still the undisputedworld heavyweight champion of latke hamantash debates.

my name is halweitzman, and i work at the university of chicagobooth school of business as the executive directorfor intellectual capital. i often get asked whatthat title actually means. it's really quite simple. i direct the school'sintellectual capital, and i do so in anexecutive manner. hal weitzman: over its70 years, this debate has shaped american culture.

hal weitzman: longbefore people talked about the dangers ofpolitical polarization, the latke hamantash divide wasa critical line of cleavage in american society. and yet some people are stillapparently unaware of what this is all about. a colleague e-mailedme a couple of weeks ago to ask whether iwould be arguing tonight in favor of latkes or ham.

hal weitzman: soone of my roles here is to explain whatthe hell is going on, to provide something of a guidefor the perplexed, if you will. i'm pretty perplexed myself,but let's give it a try. so first let's define our terms. what are latkes? what are hamantashen? well, a hamantash is a very cutethree-cornered cake or cookie stuffed with poppy seeds, fruitpreserves, or young children

and traditionally eaten onthe jewish holiday of purim. a latke is a fried potatopancake traditionally eaten on the jewishholiday of hanukkah. so what, you may ask,are purim and hanukkah? these minor festivals arefascinating in their own right, but let me summarizetheir significance by bringing a very beautifuldevore, a teaching, from reb zalman menachemtuvia zindel [inaudible] an 18th century luminary fromthe polish shtetl of glycz reb

zalman was known,as is the tradition, by his acronym made fromhis initials, the razzmatazz of glycz. in his famous bookof torah exegesis, la sim al ha glycz--in english, putting on the glycz-- he wrote,and pardon my yiddish here, [speaking yiddish]. which roughly translates as,purim is the jewish halloween. hal weitzman: and hanukkahis the jewish christmas.

of course, as withany jewish position, other rabbis vehementlydisagreed with him, with one particularlystrident view holding that purim is infact more like easter, which explains the bunnies. so why is this debate stillgoing on after 70 years? well, because arguing about foodcombines two jewish obsessions. jews can get prettyexcited about food. even a discussionabout which hallah

to cut on the shabbat table,the long one or the round one, can get extremely heated. you may already be confused. but for those who are following,indulge me one more [yiddish], one more nuance. according to jewish folklore,this lot are the good guys. look at the shape oftheir hats, round. haman-- the evil character inthe purim story-- by contrast, wore a triangular hat as thishistorically accurate sketch

demonstrates. indeed, that is why thehamantash is triangular, to remind us of haman. so a triangular hat typicallyis worn by an anti-semite, while other headgear is wornby jews or friends of the jews. let's look at some examples. shall we look at some examples? ok. bad guy ringing bell.

good guy ringing chicken. clearly evil. good. jew hater. jew. bad man. lovely boychik. wants to kill jews. wants to snuggle with jews.

not sure what's going on here. again, not surewhat's going on here. enemy of the jewsfrom wisconsin. friend of the jewsfrom illinois. again, i'm not sureabout this one. not sure about this one either. i think this one is ok. really not sure about this one. this is interesting.

but then i realized-- so you get the idea. this is a fractious debate atthe end of a fractious election campaign. it would be foolhardy so soonafter such a tumultuous race to reopen the woundsat a time when we should be letting america heal. but of course, that's exactlywhat we're going to do. so here's a question.

if we were to correlate thetwo presidential contenders with our two debatefoods, who would be what? first, donald trump. and looking for a clue asto where he might lean, we need to remember thatthe miracle of hanukkah is not so much aboutshredded potatoes, but more about the oilin which they are fried. trump, of course, loves oil. and he wants the wagewar to grab more of it.

and even after a hard-foughtelection campaign, he still has millions ofgallons of snake oil left perfect for filling the menorah. of course, the latkelove makes sense when you consider the aim ofmaking america great again. and just as i was cominginto tonight's event, i received an e-mailupdate with the news that president-elect trump isconsidering nominating a latke to be his ambassador to israel,and that he expects the latke

to solve the arab-israelidispute bigly. so if trump is a latke guy, thenhillary clinton-- here being given the stink eye for daringto try to touch a sefer torah-- is a hamantash natural. the clintons, after all, wereknown for their triangulation strategy so expertly explainedin this enlightening chart from wikipedia. if anyone had any doubtsabout her leanings, i can show to you this textmessage i received today

from her top aide'sestranged husband, disgraced politiciananthony weiner, congratulating theuniversity of chicago on holding its seventiethlatke hamantash debate. and in case youcan't see it, here's that thong in more detail. it's traditional atthe latke hamantash debate for the moderator togive an exposition involving gematria, jewish numerology.

gematria is a way of diviningdeeper meaning from hebrew words by attaching anumber to each of the 22 letters of the hebrewalphabet, the aleph bet, and manipulating them to extractsome profound significance. so if we take our twopresidential candidates, the letters of clinton inhebrew give a value of 255, while trump gives 330. don't jump ahead. now as it happens, both thesenumbers are highly significant

in judaism. in the year 255 bce, forexample, antiochus ii defeated ptolemy and marriedhis daughter berenice. ptolemy's daughter i mean,not his own daughter. this couple's grandson--so that's antiochus ii. this couple'sgrandson, antiochus iv, was the same antiochusiv against whom the maccabees rebelled, whichis the basis for the hanukkah story.

but what about the gematria? what other hebrew words have thesame value as clinton's name, the number 255? and here we have [hebrew],behind, which is what she was, ultimately. [hebrew], finger ofthe lord, which maybe explains the manic pointing. and [hebrew],there's no justice. ok, let's turn to you-know-who.

so 330 is another highlysignificant number to jews. it's actually thenumber of medieval jews who are apparently toblame for producing the entire mass of today'sashkenazim, especially significant tonight, of course,when we celebrate these two staples of ashkenazi cuisine. but again let's look for adeeper meaning in the trio of 330, trump's name. and i want to emphasizebefore i do this,

there is nothing politicalabout these results. this is merely whatthe gematria reveals. so with that disclaimer,we get [hebrew], devious. [hebrew], deceitful. and [hebrew], depressed. but enough of this nonsense. let's proceed with tonight'smain event, the debate. it's my pleasure to introducethese four fantastic debaters. our first speaker tonightis wendy freedman, the john

and marion sullivanuniversity professor of astronomy and astrophysics. professor freedmanwas a co-leader of the team that carried outthe hubble space telescope key project and established thehubble constant, the universe's expansion rate. as such, she is acutely aware ofhow insignificant life on earth really is. and that is exactly why she'sdecided to dedicate herself

to the things that really makea difference, like tonight's debate. professor freedman. wendy freedman: iam honored to have been asked to participatein an event of such cosmic and comic importance,and concerning a matter about which i amsupremely qualified to speak. in that connection, i note avery, very serious omission on the part of the organizersof the latke hamantash debate.

in the 69 yearsprior to this debate, not a single astronomer hasever been asked to participate. i think it's a shanda. a scandal. the field of astronomy, probablythe second oldest profession, has evidence ofcosmic significance that has been excludedfrom this debate. i embracecontroversial subjects. as a member of the canadianjewish community of toronto,

i grew up in culinaryand cultural controversy. in my grandparents'home, dinner arguments were in a combinationof english, yiddish, and canadian beaver grunts. and i had to learn todistinguish those three languages. sometimes the debateswere so heated that our igloo started to melt. yet you should be awarethat my late grandmothers

cheike and rivka wouldlikely be plotzing if they were here,embarrassed by the very notion that i would be calledto speak about anything related to cooking or baking. they both tried valiantly toteach me our wonderful family recipes from the holidays,but this was an area in which i did not excel. never mind that i wantedto study astrophysics. enough with thismishegas, craziness

that would for sure sealmy fate as an [yiddish] never to find a husband. my recollection--sorry, mom and dad, if you're watchingthis live streaming. i apologize. my recollection was thatthese recipes went something along the lines of, add a bissleof flour until it looks right. well, how many ouncesare in a bissle? approximately how much is that?

nu until the texture is rightand you can roll the dough. yes, but how much is that? oy vey, or oy vey ehas we say in canada. let me do it. you are no help. years later, i stillstruggle to make dough. i don't think i've evergotten the consistency right for my grandmothers'hamantaschen. fortunately, cookingand baking were not

required prerequisitesfor astrophysics. after university, iimmigrated to the us. in those days, there was nowall between our countries. not even a fence. i crossed the borderin broad daylight with a few other jewishscientists, some hockey players like wayne gretzky,some comedians you may have heard of-- johncandy, dan aykroyd, jim carrey, mike myers, and ted cruz--seeking opportunities

in a land thatembraces immigrants. 35 years of researchin astronomy has prepared me for this debate. i can state unequivocallythat i am the only person who has participated inthese debates qualified to give a complete recipe foreither latkes or hamantaschen. it requires patience to makeeither latkes or hamantaschen. in fact, 13 sevenbillion years of patience are required to createthe necessary ingredients.

here is a complete recipefor latkes and hamantaschen. preheat the universein the big bang to about 1,000 trilliondegrees celsius. from the primordialchicken soup, create hydrogen andhelium, hydrogen being an essentialingredient for water. then, expand and cool theuniverse for one billion years to allow the formation of stars. zimmer.

oops, i meant simmer. simmer. add a bissle ofsupernova explosions. see, bubbie, ilearned something. stir in more star formation,this time with heavy elements. we need sodium andchlorine to make salt, without which cookingis not very interesting. add a dollop ofplanet formation. next, a sprinkleof microbial life.

poppies and potatoes. and don't forget themagic ingredient, bubbies! and then and only thendo we get the recipe we're all familiar with. for latkes we preheat the oil. for hamantaschen wepreheat the oven. and you can look therest of it up on google if you don't know the recipe. but now you havethe complete recipe.

let's examine theingredients for latkes. the first ingredientis potatoes. after god createdthe potato, he was so enamored by thisperfect form that he decided to sprinkle themthroughout the universe. i think these lookgood enough to eat. turns out that inour solar system, there is a readysupply for latkes. the first two images are nasaimages from the asteroid belt.

astronomy tells us that potatoesare the perfect ingredient, the key to heavenly taste. now you might disagree. but good luck withfree expression, even at theuniversity of chicago. god has spoken. back to the debate at hand. i will examine the evidence,both historical and recent, for astronomicalclues to the question

of latkes versus hamantaschen. i will make four arguments. one, galileo galilei isknown both as the father of modern astronomyand of modern physics, and he was a well-knownconnoisseur of jewish cooking. he was the first to makean astronomical telescope and to look upward at the sky,and not only to look at the sky but to record andinterpret what he saw. in poring over hisnotebooks of 1609,

i have been able to revealan overlooked discovery. in addition to discoveringthe moons of jupiter, the phases of venus,spots on the sun, galileo's notebooks containhand-drawn and beautiful drawings of latkes. imagine his surprise when helooked up into the heavens and saw a beautiful, textured,and bubbly image of a hot latke as the batter hitsthe frying pan and it turns a golden brown.

here is an image fromgalileo's notebook. the phases of making latkes. galileo wrote, "i renderinfinite thanks to god for being so kindas to make me alone the first observer of marvelskept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries." i, too, now know how he felt. two, edwin hubblechanged forever our perception of theuniverse that we live in.

in the 1920s, adebate was raging in the astronomical community. this debate predated ourprestigious latke hamantash debate and it was almostequally well known, i.e. completely unknown outsideof the university of chicago. edwin hubble himself began hisdistinguished academic career he set out to studythe nature of a class of astronomical objectsknown as nebuli. a person who devotes theirlife to the study of nebuli

is known as a nebulish. that's to be distinguishedfrom the yiddish word nebbish, which means pitifullyineffectual, luckless, and timid. you don't want to be a nebbish. hubble was not a nebbish. in fact, he wasa superb athlete. he played basketball forthe university of chicago, he was a rhodes scholar, andhe rose to the rank of colonel

in world war i. so remember hewas a nebulish, not a nebbish. at the heart of thedebate was the question, were these objects nearby newstars in the process of forming or were they distant islanduniverses on their own? using the most powerfultelescopes in the world, hubble made amonumental discovery. in the words of my famous lateastronomical colleague carl sagan, also a universityof chicago alum, hubble discoveredthat the universe

is filled with billionsand billions of [yiddish]. hubble found furtherevidence that these galaxies, as the [yiddish]are now referred to, are taking part ina global expansion of the entire universe. you think i'm kidding, but ichecked the yiddish-english dictionary for galaxy. galaktik. and for the young skepticsamong you-- most of you

are not fluent inyiddish-- i double checked with theindisputable source of all knowledge, google. ok, close enough. even with the powerful hubblespace telescope-- and i've spent much of my careerobserving with it-- you don't see [yiddish] orany other astronomical objects resembling three corneredpastries with filling. albert einstein was so intriguedby hubble's discoveries

that he traveled topasadena, california, and to nearby mount wilson,home of the telescope hubble had used. and hubble let einsteinpeer through the telescope. i looked for a reference tosee if einstein had weighted in on the latkehamantash debate, or if there was a pictureof einstein in the einstein archives showing his enjoyingeither latkes or hamantaschen, but i could find no clues.

on this importantquestion, einstein did not leave us hisanswer, although i think one could make theargument that he was reacting to eating a hamantash. but we'll debate that later. three. arno penzias and robert wilsonof the bell laboratories in new jersey made a discoveryfor which they were awarded the nobel prize in 1965.

if the universe had abeginning hot enough to make the ingredients forlatkes and hamantaschen, then a relic of thisbig bang radiation should be observabletoday, cooled to a temperature of threedegrees above absolute zero. penzias and wilson discoveredthis background radiation, and modern measurements havenow mapped this background to extraordinary precision. so here is a satellite imageof the sky in microwaves.

the color scheme is, ofcourse, entirely false. it is intended simplyto convey regions of the universe that are colder,in blue, than others, in red. the astronomers who chosethis particular color scheme, however, have missedthe opportunity to make a profounddiscovery, clearly evidence that the cosmosresembles a giant latke. finally, four-- thisaudience gets ahead of you. i guess you are familiar withthe 27 kilometer long tunnel

in the countrysiderunning underground near the swiss-frenchborder outside of geneva. it is known as the lhc,or latke hamantash cooker. it is here that the worldwide web was created in the early 1990s,presumably when al gore went there to learnof experiments intended to answer the question ofwhich is better, latkes or hamantaschen. test particles, latkesand hamantaschen,

are being smashed intoeach other at astronomical energies, accelerated tonearly the speed of light, creating showers ofparticles in order to learn about the fundamentalconstituents of matter. a host of other particlesappear very briefly, particles that have notbeen seen since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. what do we see fromthese collisions? well, like the childhoodgame, which of these images

is not like the other? shower of particles createdin the latke hamantash cooker, a latke, a hamantash a three-year-old couldanswer this question. you don't need a phd scientist. sure, the lhc discovered thehiggs-boson, whatever that is. but i say higs schmigs. the great discovery justifyingthe modest investment in the lhc of $10 billion wasthat, just as the cosmos is

full of potatoes, thesubmicroscopic world is shaped like a latke. and so i rest my case. clearly, the empirical evidencefrom astronomy and physics gathered over aperiod of centuries indicates that thecosmos has a preference for latkes over hamantaschen. we see it on all scalesfrom the smallest particles, to our asteroid belt filledwith potatoes, to an expanding

world of [yiddish], andan imprint of latkes on the grandest scale--that of the universe itself. thank you very much. hal weitzman: our nextdebater is david nirenberg. in his 2013 book anti-judaism:the western tradition, professor nirenberg arguesthat the ancient egyptians may have created theirown pro-egyptian version of passover. according to thisversion, egypt was

invaded by pillaging,murderous shepherds who destroyed templesand sacred images before they were resisted. that sounds more likehanukkah than passover to me, but perhaps we haveegyptians to thank for the ultimate pesach-hanukkahhybrid food, matzah brei. david nirenberg is dean of thedivision of social sciences and the deborahand edgar jannotta professor of medievalhistory and social thought.

he also holds an academicappointment in the college and five academic appointmentsacross the social sciences and humanities divisions. given all that, we aredelighted he can spare the time to join us tonight. professor nirenberg. david nirenberg:i can't tell you how amazing it is-- this isthe achievement of a lifetime. when you get the call--i apologize to the nobels

in the audience butthis is the nobel prize of university of chicago. so you can imagine,i was elated. i thought to myself,finally i can work on problems moreimportant than the ones i've been spending my lifeon-- relations between muslims, christians, and jews over time. finally i could take on thereally significant questions of the universe.

and then i suddenlyrealized-- and this hit me like a hammer between the eyes. i'm a dean. i don't know if those of youwho are not faculty members know this, but deansare not allowed to think for themselves. so what was i going to do? i couldn't stand up here andtalk about overhead and idcs and space and locations.

and so i thought tomyself, wait a minute. if there's one thing a dean cando, it's harass his faculty. and i have the greatestfaculty in the world, faculty of the division ofthe social sciences. the faculty of the divisionof the social sciences is incredibly diverse. we work on everythingfrom archeology to some parts of zoology. we work on machiavelli.

in fact, hanna gray who oncestood here and prove to you that machiavelliwas a latke maven. we work on mris. we actually co-run themri research center with the biologicalsciences division, and we can tell you through ourmris which one of these images is the image ofa brain on latkes and which one is the imageof a brain on hamantaschen. we have very importantprojects in energy.

so i'm thinking here of theenergy policy institute chicago and the climate impactlab, and its social cost of carbon project. and i thought to myself,oh, this is perfect. right? both of these foodstuffsare energy intensive. and i hypothesized that icould go to my colleagues at the climate impact lab andthe energy policy institute chicago and ask themquestions like--

and this is reallyan obvious question-- some of the latke-drivennegative externalities of global oil demand. but hamantaschen should notfeel cocky here, pardon the pun, because after all bakingrequires combustible elements-- usually natural gasnowadays-- fracking, all kinds of immenseenvironmental consequences. i immediately thoughtto myself, i'll call michael greenstone, themilton friedman professor

of economics and the directorof the energy policy institute chicago and theclimate impact lab. and i'll ask him aboutquestions like these. so i called them up right away. i said, so haveyou done research on the negative externalitiesof latkes and oil demand. he said, no. i asked him aboutfracking and hamantash. and he said, i don't knowwhat hamantaschen are.

so i said-- then, ithought, oh, look. the milton friedman professorof economics, at least i can ask him the only questionanyone at the university of chicago cares about. did milton friedman preferlatkes or hamantaschen? he hung up on me. then i realized-- i thoughtback on borat, michael moore, colbert, jon stewart. if there's one thing noprofessor can resist,

it's the invitationto be on a talk show. so here's my talk showwith some of the greatest minds of the socialsciences division, which means, of course,some of the greatest minds of the university of chicago. i hope you enjoy it as muchas i enjoyed making it. [video playback] - well my guest today iscathy cohen, the david and mary winton green.

professor of political science. now you have since alsoundertaken a very innovative survey-type projectin collaboration with the national opinionresearch center, norc, and that's the genforward project. can you tell us alittle bit about that? - happy to. gen forward is the firstof its kind monthly survey of young people or youngmillennials 18 to 30.

we have over samples ofafrican-americans, latinos, and asian-americans. so it is representative of themillennial generation, which is probably the most raciallyand ethnically diverse generation that we've seen. and we also want to rememberthat millennials are now the largest generation, solarger than baby boomers. - and hard to access throughconventional survey techniques. - absolutely.

- could you tell alittle bit about the work you've done with gen forward? have you actually askedthat panel anything about our question today? - we have. and let me say thatagain, we see a divide. a divide betweenlatkes and hamantash, with young peopleof color much more likely to say thatthey prefer latkes

and young whites who feelpolitically alienated we might say, saying they prefer thekind of sweetness, the kind of nostalgia of hamantaschen. but i will say thatboth groups still have a level of alienation thatwe've never seen to these two food groups before, right? and in fact, they're focusedon a third candidate. a third candidate thatseemed more sustainable, that seemed more in line withthe goals of their generation.

and many of themsaid that they would prefer a bagel to eitherthe latke or the hamantash. - a bagel to either latke orthe-- this is actually quite a revolutionary turn. - i agree. - does it have implicationsfor the long term consequences of our food groups? - well i think it means thatboth those who produce latkes and those who producehamantash will

have to begin to think abouthow to incorporate some of the kind of making of bagelsinto their food products, right? so that they can apply anappeal to this new generation of eaters, who in fact willdominate the country in years to come. absolutely. - now one of the thingswe know about surveys is that they're incrediblycomplex to administer.

you mentioned oversampling. - yes. - this is a technical termthat our audience may not be aware of. - right. - and also it really matters--the confidence intervals and it's also how youknow frame the questions. i wonder, do youhave a kind of margin of error for the genforward oversampling

on the latke hamantaschen. the margin of erroris about 4% to 5%. however, the differencesin terms of preferences, in particular foryoung people of color, were well outsidethe margin of error. so i think we havegreat confidence in the divide and thefinding that i reported. our questions, again, wereas rigorous and objective as possible.

so we asked questionslike, would you prefer the kind of savory,delicious sweetness and saltiness ofa latke to a kind of muddled, sweet,ruin-your-teeth hamantash? as a way to make sure, infact, that both presentations were there. - and neutral. totally neutral. - neutral.

no bias, no bias in terms of howi thought about the question. because it's veryimportant to me, being a faculty member hereat the university of chicago, that i lead with objectivityand rigor always. - well this is the kind ofdata driven public opinion research for whichthe political science department at the universityof chicago is justly famous. thank you very muchfor joining us. - thank you.

- our guest today isprofessor cuthbert bins, the cleo professor of historyat the university of chicago. so we are very honoredto have him here to talk to us about the latkeversus the hamantaschen. professor bins, how does ahistorian think about food? what does it mean todo the history of food? - there are social historians,cultural historians, environmental historians,historians of religion, historians of food.

all of thesedifferent approaches need to be taken intoaccount-- economic historians, even, if we want to think aboutthe latke and the hamantash. - so in terms of the debatebetween latke and hamantash, how would a historianthink about the material constraints on the two? - from a materialistpoint of view i would want to ask, what arethe conditions of production of the latke versusthe hamantash?

now in the middle ages, thehamantash-- which is baked-- would have requiredaccess to forests, to wood, to materialto burn, much of which was [inaudible] controlled. you've heard, ofcourse-- from robin hood, for example-- of the royalforest, the [inaudible] forest. on the other hand, thelatke-- which requires oil-- would really havebeen, preferably, a food in the south.

in the zone of olive groves. for in the north, whereyou didn't have olive oil, it would have needed to becooked in butter or animal fat, which sounds disgusting. - professor bins, doesit make any difference to your historical analysis thatthe potato wasn't introduced into europe until afterthe discovery of america and after the endthe middle ages? - um.

- thank you for joiningus, professor bins. we very much appreciateyour historical expertise. i'm here with leslie kay,a professor of psychology here at theuniversity of chicago. - my research worksprimarily with rats, although we do foray intomice and sometimes humans. and we study howthe olfactory system constructs an internal viewof the world from the animal's perspective.

- so you're interested in howrats perceive sensory stimuli, particularly odor-- - and how contextand experience affect their perception of odor. - do latkes andhamantaschen have odor? - they do, and it's reallyinteresting because latkes-- you get the odor whileyou're in the area of where you're eating. so you cook them and servethem kind of at the same time.

where hamantaschen, youcook them the day before. - so there's a separationof sensory experiences is what you're saying. - right, right. - have you workedat all with rats on this question of how theyexperience that separation? - we do, actually. we train them torecognize an odor-- it could be just a latkeodor-- and then test them

the next day on whetheror not they recognize that in the context ofhaving eaten something quite rewarding. in the case of therats, it's sugar. but for humans, it couldbe a delicious latke. - let me just get this straight. from the series ofquestions i have asked you, i would deduce thatyou feel that latkes are more beneficial torats than hamantaschen are.

is that correct? - yeah. yeah. i mean it's a richersensory experience, i think, and so morepleasurable and better. - well i don't know ifthat's an endorsement, but it's a vote for latkesfrom the institute for mind and biology andfrom the research labs of leslie kay in thedepartment of psychology.

so i am here with marshallsahlins, the charles f. grey distinguished service professoremeritus of anthropology and of social sciences. you knew claude levi strauss. - yes, i did. - now claude levistrauss is famous, amongst many other things, forhaving written books like the raw and the cooked, honey andashes, books that were-- well, from which structuralism drewits name and that were focused

on food. also great books on kinship. my question to you is,did claude levi strauss prefer latkes or didhe prefer hamantaschen? - i didn't know him thatwell to ask that question. but in any case, whati want to talk about is more derivative from levistrauss when we come to food. and that's marydouglas, actually. - oh, the great anthropologist--

- the great socialanthropologist from britain who wrote a lot aboutthe old testament. and i want to takeoff from something that she wrote, of what's calledthe abominations of leviticus. it's in her bookpurity and danger. and i think it's relevant tothe hamantash latke distinction. - how is it relevant? - well if i can-- i can showyou on the board, actually. - oh please.

- we know that thehamantash is a triangle and a latke is a kindof a round circle. now any anthropologistwould know that we're dealing of afundamental convention where triangles are maleand circles are female. so we can call thishamantash and latke. and we do thingslike this-- this would be a marriagebetween them and this would be-- well,actually, there's

something going wrong here. their offspring, anoffspring that immediately calls into question this wholerelationship because it's a hybrid, which is in jewishtradition an abomination. so we have a problem here. this is clearly a misalliancein the jewish tradition. and one of twothings in that case. either it's toodistant, that it's like a marriage with a gentile.

or it's too close, it's incest. it's not likely to be incestfor a couple of reasons. one is that the partnersare too different. they couldn't be verymuch from the same family since one is baked and the otheris fried; one is triangular, the other is round; one issweet and the other is salty; and so on. so the chances are that one ofthese two people is a gentile. - how do we know which one?

and is that a badthing or a good thing? - yeah, now we haveto find out which one. i think it's easy, pretty easy. first of all, hamantaschen. haman, by the other equinoctialcalendar-- his holiday, purim. he's obviously an enemy. haman, hamantash isactually a reference to haman in many biblicalor talmudic commentaries about these matters.

moreover, since we're talkingabout jewish tradition, we wouldn't beinterested in this unless it was ajewish tradition. and it's obvious thatin the jewish tradition, you have to be born of ajewish woman to be jewish. so she is obviously jewish, andhe is apparently not jewish. not only is he an enemy bypurim, but latke, i think, is a preferredfood in many ways. - i want to thankyou for representing

a field of inquiry,anthropology, that has a storied pasthere at the university. before i let you go, i justneed a clear statement. whose side are you on here? - well obviously,i'm on latke's side. i mean, hamantaschenis not jewish. - i give you marshall sahlins. my guest today isprofessor james heckman, the henry schultzdistinguished service professor

in the department of economics. you have a work-in-progress,a fascinating paper called "the dynamic model ofhealth, addiction, education, and wealth." - exactly. this is very relevantto the debate. in fact, it's also veryuniversity of chicago because you start with therational addiction model that gary becker and kevinmurphy developed in 1988.

- correct, yes, we startwith that and build on it and test it actually. - in which agents combineunhealthy addictive goods, - correct. - so-- - smoking or eating foods thatare not very healthy, yes. - and then you goon in that paper to evaluate the impact ofrevenue neutral excise taxes on unhealthy goods.

- yes, correct. - and you show that theaccumulation of addiction capital stock isgoverned by past history and is cumulative over time. - so my question to youis, could you quantify-- since you've shown usthat the nutritional value of hamantaschen is actuallydetrimental to education, attention, et cetera-- - in these early childhood--

- in these earlychildhood years-- - correct, yes. - and that it's addictive-- - could you quantify, throughyour rational addiction model, the cost to society-- or let'ssay the benefit to society-- of using latkes as snacks inearly childhood education? - yes, actually. this is a researcherarea-- we're right at the frontierin this particular area.

and the reason is,it's well documented. see, one of the great themesof the university of chicago social science ishow it straddles across the disciplines. not just social science. you know the old statement,i think, that hayek made. the only person-- an economistwho only does economics is not a very good economist. here, we're borrowingfrom the biology

and borrowing fromthe work on nutrition. and what we found, and what'sbeen found in the literature, is that sugar isfar more addictive than other kinds of foods. so if you were to makea comparison-- just to calibrate our model,this model of addiction. we're consumingthis food-- sugar, in this case-- in theform of the hamantaschen. and also the flour,the flour is no good

because that's turninginto sugar as well. so that by itself iscreating issues about health down the road, butit's also building a much greater addictivetaste than, for example, the savory food. even the one that'smore fat based. taxing this triangleturns out to have a welfare benefit in termsof health and addiction. - and behavior.

- so we're going tohave less obesity, we're going to have greaterhealth, much less diabetes. no question that consumingsugar and the flour that goes into the hamantaschen-- - there areeducational outcomes. - much better educationaloutcomes, but also a bunch of other outcomes. health education, participationin crime, i would argue, the ability tofocus, self-control

in a variety of areas of life. so if you start early on thisaddictive process of consuming sugar. it's going to be very hard whenyou're in your 30s, your 40s, to stop this process. and then the process ofobesity will continue. health problems will flourish. and then society willhave missed a great option for improving thelife of its children.

- you heard it here. data driven policyanalysis from the center for economics ofhuman development and its director, james heckman. many thanks. - ok, thank you. i'm here with professor solomonhegel from the committee on social thought at theuniversity of chicago. professor solomon hegel isa distinguished authority

on fundamental texts ofthe western tradition, and we're here to findout what he thinks about latke and hamantaschen. would you perhapsbegin by giving us some idea of what thecommittee on social thought is? - that is a verydifficult question. the committee was formed by johnunef, after whom it's named, in the 1930s and '40s inorder to attract great minds. - professor hegel, does thecommittee on social thought

have a position on latkeversus hamantaschen? - latke versus hamantaschen. well you have to understand thatthe committee on social thought is concerned withfundamental texts and fundamental questions. i can't think of anymention of a latke or of a hamantaschen inthe texts that interest us. - so professor hegel,are you telling us that the committee on socialthought and its approach

to fundamental textscan tell us nothing about latkes or hamantaschen? - oh no. certainly socialthought has something to say about latkesand hamantaschen. we have something tosay about everything. amongst the pre-socratics,we would either say that latke andhamantaschen were actually both the same thing since thereis only oneness and sameness.

i'm thinking hereobviously of parmenides. or we could say with heraclidesthat there is no one thing called a latke or calleda hamantash, that they are constantly becomingdifferent unto themselves. you cannot bite intothe same latke twice. and then if i start to thinkabout our other fundamental guiding star in thecommittee on social thought-- i'm speaking ofhegel, of course-- i'd have to say that theproblem looks somewhat similar.

that is to say, you mightbegin with this antithesis that you seem to beposing to us here between a latkeand a hamantaschen. or a hamantash, isthat the singular? but in the end, these antithesessublate and become one. - all right, professorhegel, if you could just tell me in one sentence, then. do you come down onthe side of the latke or on the side of the hamantash?

- well i would haveto say, either or. - either or? - you keep returningto the thing in itself. i tell you we're not interestedin the thing in itself, we're interested in the idea. the mind cannot reachthe thing in itself. surely you should know this. if you don't knowthis, then you belong in some vulgardisciplinary department,

not in the committeeon social thought. [end playback] david nirenberg: so apart fromsome ambivalent humanistic types from historyand social thought, it's pretty clear that the greatminds of the social sciences division think that,definitively, latke is the preferred food group. and i want to firstthank my colleagues and thank reneebasick and anna gregg

for their helpproducing this marvelous proof of the superiorityof the latke. and i'd also like tooffer my apologies to the organizers of thelatke hamantaschen debate, because after thisdefinitive demolishing of any alternativeopinion i don't really see how we can have futuredebates in future years. hal weitzman: our next debateris an expert on the literature and philosophy from the periodof the roman emperor nero,

who, according to thetalmud-- no word of a lie, in masechet gittin, personalfavorite of many of us here tonight-- converted tojudaism, and whose descendant was rabbi meir. the talmud tells us thatall anonymous missioners are attributed to rabbi meir. to my mind, thatdefeats the idea of offering anonymousmissioners in the first place. it may, however, havebeen a way of testing out

the missioners first. if they got a good laugh amongthe men of the great assembly, then rabbi meir would have beenhappy to claim them as his own. shadi bartsch-zimmer is thehelen regenstein distinguished service professor of classics inthe program in gender studies. she's also director ofthe stevanovich institute on the formation of knowledge. professor bartsch-zimmer. shadi bartsch-zimmer:good evening, everybody.

when i was offered thechoice of championing the latke or thehamantash tonight, the answer seemed obvious. on the one hand, you have a foodwhose fundamental ingredient is so necessarythat millions died without it during the irishpotato famine of 1845 to 1849. on the other hand,you have a cookie who's most popular fillingis made from the poppy seed, a product also responsiblefor heroin, drug wars,

and millions of deaths. no potatoes, bad. no poppy seeds, good. quod erat demonstrandum. but then i rememberedwith great dismay that today'sdistinguished speakers are supposed to defendtheir chosen food from the point of view oftheir academic discipline, not just on its own merits.

i say with greatdismay because my field is ancient greekand roman literature and culture, specificallythe neronian period. and not only did theromans not have latkes, but the potato itselfwas unknown to them. i was hoping that when theromans went off to jerusalem to destroy thetemple in 70 ad, they might have stopped along theway to try a few tasty potato snacks, but no such luck.

as we say in latin,oy vey maximus. in fact, the first europeansto discover the potato were the spanish conquistadorswho invaded the new world in the sixteenth century. they found this rootvegetable in popular use in chile and peru, andthey took it back to europe with them for cultivation. this happenedroughly 15 centuries after the reign of neroin the first century ad,

which as i'm sure youknow was from 54 to 68 ad. this means that, despitethe family resemblance, nero never ate a potato. this presented me withan immediate crisis. i was a classics professorspeaking up for the latke, and i had no potatoesto speak with. of course, the absence ofthe potato in ancient rome might have been good fromthe potato's point of view, since we don't knowexactly how nero

would have reacted to itsimport from south america. the potato might neverhave survived in the west if, for some reason, itoffended the emperor. that's a potato. you see that, right? so in order to proceed, imust ask your indulgence to speak about roman rootvegetables in general. things like potatoes, forexample-- beets, turnips, parsnips-- all closelyrelated to potatoes.

and i assure you that if theromans did have potatoes, they would have treatedthem with the same reverence as we moderns and they wouldhave made wonderful latkes out of them. now that i've mademy confession, let me turn to thevirtues of the latke and the moral failingsof the hamantash. let's start with thelatke, the alpha and omega of all human progress.

first, you will noticean uncanny similarity between the woventexture of the latke-- with its inter-crossingpotato fibers-- and one of the first marksof western civilization, the woven fabric. here you see one of theworld's oldest pieces of cloth, the 2,800year old lusohoj textile from the nationalmuseum of denmark. this roughly wovencloth, found in 1861,

was wrapped around crematedhuman remains as a shroud. it is a dense and balanced weavewith approximately 16 threads per centimeter in boththread directions. the fiber material wasoriginally identified as flax, while later studies suggestedthat it might be nettle. even the naked eye,however, can tell that it's made from potato plants. this discovery is directlylinked to the birth of agriculture in europe.

since the productionof plant fiber textiles in ancient europe was associatedwith human beings starting to farm textileplants domestically in order to provide astable source of clothing. in other words,the need to weave drove the developmentof human civilization from a crudehunter-gatherer state to cultivated agriculture. and in fact, not only ineurope but everywhere weaving

was an essential partof human progress. it later led to sheepbreeding for wool, and i hardly need topoint out that it's a short step from that to thetelephone and the internet. so on the one hand, we havethe intricately woven strands of potato thatmake up the latke. on the other hand, wehave the lusohoj fabric. both designed tosustain human life and both uncannily alike instructure, pattern, and shape.

here we see the root vegetableand weaving come together in a stunning parallel thatsuggests that the latke itself is the perfect metaphorfor civilization. it is a root vegetablethat has been woven. it is a beautiful thing. don't let me stop here. for the ancient greeksand romans, weaving wool had even greater significance,if that can be imagined. that is, it wasn't just thesign that their civilization had

developed to a certain state. it was a metaphor evenwithin their own culture for the writing of poetry, thepolitics of the city-state, and the harmony ofgood leadership. ancient poets referredto their compositions as consisting of theweb and warp of song, borrowing terminologydirectly from the loom. and that concept isparalleled in latin, which uses the vocabularyof textum and texere, which

originally meant toweave but now stands for a text or writing. some scholars haveeven suggested that the prevalence ofthe language of texere, which of course we still usetoday when we speak of a text, is due to thepresence of the letter x in the middle of the word. i quote, "no lettermore precisely suggests the mythof weaving better

than the x, the crossingof opposing threats." what else does the crisscrossedx of the latke stand for? now that we've establishedits relationship to weaving, can it be coincidentalthat in the odyssey the clever penelope wove byday and unraveled by night the shroud that she was weavingfor her father-in-law laertes? as you'll recall,she had promised she would marryone of the suitors once the cloth was finished,hence her nightly labor

to keep the suitors at baywhile her husband odysseus was wandering acrossthe mediterranean. penelope's wool workthus stands not only for cleverness and industry,but also, of course, for chastity since sheused it to preserve hers. x is for chastity. finally, further literaryevidence from the ancient world also suggests that weaving canstand for the body politic, in this way bridging the privateworld of the ancient woman

with the public civicworld of the man. consider aristophanes'play lysistrata, in which the womenof sparta refuse to have sex with theirhusbands until they stop the peloponnesianwar with athens. and note again herethe theme of chastity. the spartan heroinelysistrata not only gets the women of athensand the other city-states to follow suit onthe no sex policy,

she also encourages the takeoverof the state itself by women. as she tells herunhappy husband, it might not beso idiotic as you think to run thewhole city entirely on the model of theway we deal with wool. she then describes aweaving government analogy to show how women wouldbe better rulers than men. i am going toquote it and i hope that our incomingpoliticians take good notice.

"the first thingyou do with wool is you wash thegrease out of it. you can do the same with a city. then you stretch out thecitizen body on a bench and you pick out the burrs--that is, the parasites. after that, you priseapart the club members who form themselves into knotsand clots to get into power. and when you've separated them,you pick them out one by one. then you're readyfor the carting.

they can all go into thebasket of civic goodwill, including the residentaliens and any foreigners who are your friends. yes, and even those who arein debt to the treasury. not only that, athenshas many colonies. at the moment these arelying all over the place like stray bits of wool. you should pick themup and bring them here, put them together, andthen out of all of this

make an enormousgreat ball of wool. and from that, you canmake the people a coat." my point is here thatweaving and political life go hand-in-hand. as scholars havesuggested, only weaving could represent the unifyingof opposite political stances, the tangled intriguesof statesmanship, the necessity of mending riftsbetween prominent families, and the suturing ofdifferences to form

a single harmonious society. we need some weavers inamerican democracy today. but let's return toour latke, which i hope has not gotten toolost from our view. it's time to examine thesecond ancient perspective on the latke, and this isthe medical perspective. yes, latkes were medicine-- orat least, they would have been. contrary to the situation inour post-antibiotic world, in antiquity-- generallyspeaking-- most of what

was used as medicinewas, in fact, food. as the ancients saw it,foodstuffs played two roles. on the one hand, they were anutrient necessary for life to provide thewherewithal for growth. on the other hand,they could act as drugs-- aspharmaca-- or better, still, as pharmacological agentswith an effect good or bad upon the physiologicalprocesses of the body. so if food stuffs aremedicine, which foodstuff

had the best medicaleffect for humans? the answer, of course,is the root vegetables, the turnips and beets that werethe romans' proto-potatoes. to prove this, weneed only consult two famous ancient physiciansand their handbooks: pliny the youngerand cornutus celsus. i have saved youthe work of reading through these rather long, drytomes on the medical properties of various vegetables,herbs, and small animals.

and i have puttogether a summary of the propertiesof root vegetables for your edification. so the turnip cures gout. raddish skinseliminate gallstones. radishes are also goodfor intestinal hernias. they also get rid of head lice. beets are the cure forcreeping sores of the genitals. turnips cure ulcerated sores.

and many radishes, whateverthose are, cure jaundice. please note here theutility of beets for stds. isn't it depressing thatfor centuries people risked their lives bytaking doses of mercury to cure their syphiliswhen all they needed to do was eat a few beets? beets were also acknowledgedas being very good for constipation. they were specificallyprescribed for stomach problems

caused by an excess of rich foodbecause of their purgative side effects. so we find in the third bookof apicius' ases cookbook that beet dishes are twicerecommended as laxatives. and in this, apicius is inaccord with the medical advice of galen and pliny. poppy seeds, as youwill see shortly, have the opposite effect,clogging up the system by their sedative powers.

so to wrap up thelatke, i will just add that, like theirfellow root vegetables, potatoes contain awealth of health benefits that make them an essentialdietary item for most of the world's population. as modern doctorsacknowledge, potatoes improve digestion, reducecholesterol levels, boost heart health,protect from polyps, prevent cancer, manage diabetes,strengthen the immune system,

reduce signs of aging,protect the skin, increase circulation,reduce blood pressure, maintain fluid balance, reduceinsomnia, and boost eye health. don't forget the lastone, boost eye health. it will be very important. i now turn to squishingthe unhealthy hamantash with a few well-placedobservations. do you remember when elaine onseinfeld failed a drug test? it was in the 1996episode called

"the showerhead."do you remember why elaine failed the drug test? exactly. she had eaten a largepoppy seed muffin before taking the drug test. this is not a myth,it is medical reality. you can potentiallyfail a drug test if you eat a poppyseed hamantash. but since the university hasoverlooked the importance

of testing assistantprofessors for opium levels as part of thetenure process, i'm willing to put this reasonfor avoiding poppy seed hamantaschen aside. there are many other reasons. we were just speaking ofthe properties of beets, for example, and we canlearn from modern medicine that poppy seeds withoutbeets are a bad dietary call. we can learn thisfrom the internet site

physicians who listen. i quote, "one cannot,or at least should not, eat poppy seedhamantaschen alone. whether we are talking aboutopium, heroin, or just poppy seed filling, they allcause constipation. this is one of the reasons whyyou need to have some good root vegetables lying around." but let us go backto the ancients again for the real reasonto avoid hamantaschen.

i promise that these reasonswill shock and dismay you, and that you will never lookat hamantaschen in the same way again. first of all, you shouldknow-- or you may already know-- that the romans lovedrich food and heavy banqueting. i'm sure you know it becauseof all those movies with romans barfing in vomitoria. i show you here a typicalroman luxury food: doremice sprinkledwith poppy seeds.

it's taken right out ofthe apicius's cookbook. these poor hampster-like animalswere sprinkled with poppy seed and honey, and wereserved with hot sausages on a silver gridiron, underneathwhich were damson plums and pomegranate seeds. not the damn poppy seeds again. this is no accident. poppy seeds werepart of the luxury diet, a deliciousand exotic flavoring.

at the same time,roman moralists deplored the sign ofcorruption and professed to be shocked atthe very banquets with ostriches andpeacocks and turtles and hamantaschen that theydescribed in severe terms. among the moralizers,ancient doctors in particular warned of the physicaldegeneration that followed a diet of rich food,and they linked it to swellings in the joints.

they were not wrong, if you'llrecall henry viii and his gout. henry viii ate rich food,and-- voila!-- gout, which as you know producespainful joints swellings especially in the big toe. diet plays a keyrole in increasing the chances of developinggout and the usual advice is to avoid high purine foodsbecause they raise uric acid levels, and uricacid causes gout. but more recently,medical research

has made a direct connectionbetween gout and sugar. fructose both increasesthe production of uric acid and reduces the body'sability to get rid of it. that is, sugar and goutare directly linked. pastries and goutare directly linked. hamantaschen and goutare directly linked. what is amazing is that ancientdoctors already knew this. the good doctor celsus warnsus that anything that is sweet is bad for digestionand the body.

most of it is consumed preciselybecause it tastes so good, so both the foodstuff itselfand overindulgence in it lead to deleteriouseffects upon one's health. they don't only produce gout,but a whole host of diseases. and now i'm going to readto you a description of what the side effects of this kindof over-sweet eating are. this is from seneca, letter 95. "from this came pallor andthe trembling of muscles drenched in wine--"the guy was eating

wine and hamantash "andemaciation from digestion worse than that from hunger. from this camethe unsteady steps of tottering men, and alwaysa staggering like drunkenness itself. from this camedropsy throughout all the skin and adistended belly that isn't used to taking inmore than it can hold. from this, a spreading of yellowbile and emasculated face,

and the rot of bodies decayinginwardly, and fingers gnarly with their stiffening joints,and an inertia of muscles lying there without sensationor spasming without relief. why mention dizziness in thehead or agony in the eyes and ears, and itchinessin one's fevered brain, and the afflictionof the parts we use for defecation with ulcers,and innumerable sorts of fevers besides?" as i move to my lastand decisive rebuttal

of any half bakedhamantaschen lovers, let me remind you here thatancient medicine, in antiquity and long after, was basedon the theory of the humors. as you can see fromthis slide, humorism was a system ofmedicine that posited that we are each fullof four distinct body fluids: black bile, yellowbile, phlegm, and blood. your humors increasedor decreased depending on yourdiet, and eating

too much of the wrongthing could therefore affect both your personalityand your physical health, as seneca justspelled out for us. the reason that eatingtoo much of certain foods like hamantaschenis bad for you is that it leads to a buildupof certain byproducts from the humors. and these byproducts, like uricacid, can devastate the body. what are the main byproductsof eating too much

of the wrong kind of food? i will cite for you justone illustrative example from aristotle. he and certain othersources maintain that certain kindsof rich foods, such as the hamantaschen,cause the humor blood to convert to its byproduct,which i'm very sorry to say is semen. according to aristotleand other medical experts,

not only is semen a residuemade after food's transition into blood, but this residueis stored in a particular part of the body. and again, i quote,"it is the region around the eyes that isthe most full of seed, for the region around theeyes is, of all the head, that which is mostnearly connected with the generative secretions. a proof of this is that italone is visibly changed

in sexual intercourse, and thosewho indulge too much in this are seen to havetheir eyes sunken in." the semen all dissipatesand then your eyes sink in. "the reason it's stored thereis that semen is like the brain, for its material is watery,the heat being acquired later." to sum up an excessof sweet food creates unhealthy blood, whichconverts to an excess of semen, and the inevitable resultis-- i dread to say it-- leakage from the eyes.

you've heard of crocodile tears,this condition is far worse. and you will recall, ihope, that i mentioned the fact that potatoeslead to eye health is a very important touch. i think this is the right noteto end on, so let us conclude. our investigation has shown thatthe latke stands for poetry, civilization, and statesmanship,and that all root vegetables are good for the body. while the consumptionof hamantaschen,

especially poppyseed hamantaschen, causes constipation, maculationof the face, jaundice, tooth decay, gout and arthritis,internal rot of the body, ulcers and boils, semenbuild-up behind the eyes, and ultimately death. with a list of suchreactions as these, we can now safelyspeculate in a way dared by no previous historianabout that most mysterious of historicalcataclysms, the fall of rome.

rome fell in 476 ad, but why? the english historianedward gibbon, who wrote in the lateeighteenth century, blames the rise ofchristianity and its effect on the roman psyche. other scholars have suggestedthat the decline and fall was inevitable due to the influxof barbarians from the north. today, we have seen that ahitherto-unacknowledged reason for rome's topplefrom her heights

can be traced back to agrowing taste for an insidious, hidden invader. we now know the worst. the harmful, flesheating hamantash caused the fall of rome. thank you. hal weitzman: ok, our lastspeaker tonight is anne rogers. professor rogers is an associateprofessor of computer science. she's director of the master'sprogram in computer science

and the faculty co-directorof the computational analysis and public policymaster's program. when she was directorof the ph.d program, she would often tell studentsthat you start graduate school with a vision of "mydissertation, the movie," an own graduate school with "mydissertation, the pretty good short story." tonight, perhaps, "mydissertation, the joke." professor rogers.

anne rogers: soi am anne rogers. i do not stand still. my students will tell you thati start every class that i teach every quarter atthe university-- i've been here about 15 years--by saying, i'm anne rogers. i talk fast and i swear. i'm from the east coast. we talk fast. we swear.

we also have verystrong opinions. so even though youcould pick me up and you could drop me in dublinand no one would look at me and say, thatperson isn't irish, i do have, in fact,a very strong opinion about the question oflatkes and hamantaschen. in fact, my family is verybig fans of this debate. and i have always sat, when theywere planning to go, thinking, what is there to debate?

and tonight actuallythere isn't a debate, because i'm on team latkeand all my fellow speakers are also on team latke. so it's a littlestrange, but that's ok. i'm told there isa clicker here. i also want to say thatthere is some good reason why i was chosen. so i'm obviously not jewish. but i was born in newark.

so i was born on theeast coast, but i was born in newark, new jersey. and for those of you who don'tknow anything about newark, it was the home of philiproth, and was in fact in the 60s-- before the60s, into the 60s-- a place that had a tremendousamount of jewish culture and tradition woven throughthe fabric of the city. so even though i grew up in thevailsburg section of newark, which was full ofirish-catholic cops and firemen,

it was not uncommon to hearyiddish because that was just part of the city. and so i have opinions. and in fact my opinion isthat i'm interested in latkes. so also i grew upin an irish family, and you have a choicein an irish family. you either learnto hate potatoes or you learn to thinkthat potatoes should be served at every meal,preferably two or three

different kinds. so i got this imitation and iwas really tremendously honored to have been asked. i wouldn't quite sayit's the nobel prize because i'm a computer scientistand we don't have one of those. but it was, in fact, abig honor to be asked. and so i said yes. and then it was one of thosemoments when you hit send and you think, ok.

can i please reach down throughthe wire and pull that back? because i didn't really thinkthere was anything to debate. and so how was i goingto stand up here and say for a long period of time inthis very scholarly way-- which i have to say,people from newark don't do that so much-- inthis very scholarly way, how do computer scientists thinkabout latkes and hamantaschen. so this was anissue, but also i had a little bit of anexistential crisis

because it's notclear what i am. i am a trainedcomputer scientist as well was pointedout, but also i have done administration atthe university for a long time. and i am, by vocation,really an educator. and so i thought, all right. i'll start as acomputer scientist and see if, in my roleas a computer scientist, i can come up with away to argue for latkes.

and so computer scientists,at a very broad brush-- for my colleagues, i apologizefor those of you who are here-- think about thingsin one of two ways. so either you havebeautiful handwriting and you provethings for a living. as my students willtell you, i do not have beautifulhandwriting and i do not prove things for a living. so i wasn't goingto-- this thanks

to my colleague johno'simon, who does have beautiful handwriting. ok, so the otherthing that you do as a computer scientistis, if you don't write proofs you write code. all right, so i'm goingto write some code. and so now thequestion is what code to write to prove thatlatkes are the right thing? so as you well know, big datais a big thing out in the world

these days. and i thought, welli should do big data because that's whatcomputer scientists are supposed to do these days. and so i thought, ifi'm going to do big data then i shoulddecide-- maybe we'll let the web decide are latkesor hamantaschen better. and so i thought, allright how do i do this? i'm going to do thisby writing some code

to figure out are there morepictures of latkes on the web or are there more picturesof hamantaschen on the web? all right, so howdo you do this? whenever you do this kindof task, what you have to do is you have to go out andfind training samples. and of course youhave to not eat them. so you have to findtraining samples, so here's my training latke. so we have to ask,what makes it a latke?

and as the previouspeople have pointed out, really what makes it alatke is that it's a circle. so we will lookfor circles and we will see whether or notwe think they're correctly labeled as latkes. of course and as we know,hamantaschen are triangles. i would have made them red had icollaborated with my colleagues before, but we'regoing to go for blue. so here's how we'regoing to tell.

so the first questionis-- so my students will tell you that ilike people to respond when i ask questions. i just stand and stare at themuntil one of them responds, and you need to respond. so there are goingto be questions and it's very important thatyou give the right answer because i might laugh at you. all right, so we'regoing to go through

and we're going to look atsome latkes and hamantaschen. and we're going toask, what are they? ok, so what is this, alatke or a hamantaschen? you're not supposed toget the right answer. you're supposed to getthe wrong answer, folks. i say this to mystudents all the time. please give me the wrong answerso that i can explain to you the reason why you're wrong. all right, but-- no, you'veobviously gotten the joke.

so this is a latke because,of course, it's a circle. all right, so-- butwhat about this one? latke or hamantaschen? right. it's clearly a hamantaschenbecause it is a triangle. maybe this going with the shapething is not working so well. but we'll keep goingand see what happens. so what do we look at next? well next, weget-- what is this?

obviously, it's neither. it's a kippah. but we're going to call ita latke because clearly it is round. so maybe the problem hereis not so much shape, but in this case maybei should have just stuck to things that are food all right, so we'llmove onto something that looks more like food.

so what is this one? well i was actuallyreally, really pleased with this one for two reasons. one, it's clearly notjust a single hamantash, it's many hamantaschen. so this was a good thing. but also you'll notice therethat my system-- this very carefully designedsystem on which i spent hours and hours-- was not fooledby the hidden latke, which

unfortunately does not lineup the way one would hope. all right, so thisclearly-- like many things having to do with big data--there was a lot of hype here. and maybe it's not themost successful approach to deciding latkesversus hamantaschen. so we're going tomove on from big data. and so my role as acomputer scientist maybe didn't work out aswell as i would have hoped, so we'll try administrator.

and you don't really wantto watch me push paper from one side of mydesk to the other, which is what i normally do inmy role as an administrator. so we'll talk aboutbudgets, because we all know budgets are really very funny. ok, so we're going to doa cost-benefit analysis of the question of latkesversus hamantaschen. and we're going to figure outwhich of these will give us the right answer.

there's a whole seriesof official steps you're supposed to do, ilearned from wikipedia, when you do acost-benefit analysis. and so what areour alternatives? well our alternativesare clearly latkes and hamantaschen. who are the stakeholders? the members of theuniversity community. this all seems fine so far--a little dull, but moving on.

what are the appropriatemeasurements? now this one isquite difficult. what do you measurewhen you're trying to figure out which of theseis the right one to choose. so we've gotingredients and labor, and there's actually avery funny long discussion that's a feministhistory of why latkes are better than hamantaschen. and i should have citedit because i'm a scholar,

but i didn't. but you should look itup because it actually is pretty funny. it is not from theuniversity of chicago, and for that i apologize. but then there's, ofcourse, increased consumer satisfaction, which is importantin this particular thing. you need to protectthe relevant outcomes over the period of time.

well, everybody's going to eattoo much no matter what it is. there are other very,very boring steps to this discussion. we're going to skipthose because this really is not worth well either way. and so now we'rejust going to say, what is our cost-benefitanalysis recommendation? so clearly they'regoing to be latkes because it's the right answer.

but we have this problemthat-- you may not know this, but i went this afternoon to thecouncil of [inaudible] senate meeting which is these veryserious faculty members having very serious discussionsabout very serious things including, today, the budget. and what i learnedat this meeting-- and i've learnedat every meeting i've been to on the budget--is that actually, you can have one oflatkes or hamantaschen

but you can't have bothapplesauce and sour cream and you can't have that manylatkes, because let's face it. the budget is really tight. this did not workall that well either. it's a little funny. it's not that funny. so i move on tomy third identity, which is thatreally at its heart, what i am is an educator.

really what i do, the thing thatmakes me get up in the morning and decide i want to gooff to the university is that i teach people howto think computationally. now some of mystudents are here. welcome, thank you for coming. and what theywould tell you is-- so i could give youa typical anne rogers lecture, whichi'm actually doing a pretty good imitation of.

i talk fast, i swear, i wander. i do all those things. but the problem with that isthat giving a lecture like that and saying whether latkesor hamantaschen are better would be very difficult,because mostly those lectures consist of, "yada,yada, yada, abstract! yada, yada, yada, abstract!" as a verb. most of you probably don'tuse abstract as a verb.

i would say thingslike, write functions. and that's not allthat fun either. but i realized that overthe course of the quarter, students will very frequentlysay to me, professor rogers, what's the right answer? do i do it this way,or i do it that way? and i constantly say tothem, well it depends. these things are oftena matter of opinion, and so that brought me back tothis question of this debate.

is there really a debate here,and is there a right answer? and so i thought iwould pick a few things that computer scientistslike to have debates about that probably most of youwill think, who the fuck cares. but we do in factactually care very deeply about these questions,and argue about them for long periods oftime for no good reason. ok, so the first of theseis-- so the first of these is tabs versus spaces.

so for those of you who don'tknow, when you write code-- and i'm actually giving a wholelecture here and not showing you a single line of code. fortunately one of my studentsbrought some code with her on a sign. so we have code in the room. so we're safe. but when you writecode, you have to decide-- you have to indenttwo spaces, four spaces, right?

so the question is, do youspaces or do you use tabs? and so now i'll show you a quickvideo on exactly this topic which hopefully will work. - richard, what's wrong? - nothing. nothing. literally, it's all good. - come on. - oh my god.

- i'm sorry. - your roommates were right. you really hate spaces. - no, no, no, no, i don't. it's not hate. hate's a strong word. truth be told, i do have aslight preference for tabs. anne rogers: so actually, peoplereally do care about this. and i have to tell you thati'm in a mixed marriage.

so i'm a spaces gal. my husband is a tabs guy. we manage to get along, sort of. all right, so the nextquestion that people discuss-- and this one is really, like--you want to start a flame war among computer scientists? look at them in this veryinnocent way and say, so i need to pick an editor. what editor should ichoose to write my code?

and so we can ask that question. - i mean, why not justuse vim over emacs? - i do use vim over emacs. - oh, god help us. anne rogers: and again,i'm in a mixed marriage. god invented emacs for a reason. i don't know wherevim came from, but my husband's a vim guy. and i really-- i do love him.

all right. and then the last question ischoice of programming language. again, this is a topicon which people have very, very strong opinions. and sometimes itactually really matters. if you want your codeto go wicked fast, and you don't wantit to stop to garbage collect, for instance, becauseyou're on the space shuttle, then you probably want togo with something like c.

or you might be interestedin a trendy language. you want to be able towrite on your resume that you can programin swift or go or lua. i think that's howyou pronounce it. i'm a little old for that one. then you're going togo with one of those. or you might go with sometried and true thing. but people do-- thereare good reasons to have opinions onthis particular topic.

and there are rightsolutions in some situations and wrong solutionsin some situations. and i guess in the end i lookedat these questions and i said, you know sometimes there'sa right answer, right? sometimes you look ata question and people think there is a debate,like tabs versus spaces, and there's reallya right answer. and you reallyshould treat people with respect and dignity.

there's a rightanswer to that, right? there's no debate there. and yet somehow in our countrytoday, there is a debate and there shouldn't be. and sometimes there'sactually a real reason to have a debate, like what isthe right programming language to use for a topic. and so i think i kind ofwant to end on the note of, it's important forus to understand

when is there adebate that we really should have andthink deeply about and when are we just goingto argue because it's fun. and i will end on the notethat i'm on team latke and i am on a committee. and i was sitting aroundtalking to my fellow committee members, none of whomare computer scientists. and i said, so i'm doing thelatke hamantaschen debate and i'm very nervous.

and i don't haveany computer science jokes because it's not really acomputer science kind of thing. and so i don't know what to do. and one of my fellowcommittee members said, anne, this isvery straightforward. he said, when you greatpotatoes you get bits. they turn into bites. and so latkes win. so thank you very much.

hal weitzman: wellthat was one sided. but i think if we've learnedanything in the past few weeks, it's that there are no foregoneconclusions in any polls. so the words have been spoken. now it is for thestomachs to decide at the reception in hutch. entry to the reception costs $5. note that your entry to thisdebate was entirely free. that, the organizersapparently believe,

is a fair reflection of therelative value of these two events. now this was pretty one sided,but let's not kid ourselves that this has been definitive. this debate will go on. for how much longer? well the chicagocubs had to wait 108 years for their relief, sowe have at least 38 years left, if not another 70.

but for tonight, the momentsof judgment between latke and hamantash is upon us. in mandel hall it is written,and in hutchinson commons it is sealed. who will be devoured andwho will be disavowed? who will be eaten for lunch andwho will be left in the lurch? who will be retweeted andwho will have retreated? who will be polished offand who will be pooh poohed? who will be eaten andwho will get beaten?

who will be snacked uponand who will be snubbed? who will be demolished andwho will be disregarded? who will be fated andwho will get wasted? who will be deemed deliciousand who considered disgusting? who will be called incredibleand who considered inedible? who will be raisedup and chomped down, and who will be forceddown and thrown up? which is which isup to you to decide. dahlia leffell: goodevening, everyone.

i hope you allenjoyed the debate. my name is dahlialeffell, and i am the president of hillel'sstudent leadership board. and i would just like to saythat i was thoroughly impressed by all of our debaters tonight. dahlia leffell:however, i will say that as a longtimefan of the hamantash, i think it deservesa little credit. while, as has beenproven tonight,

the latke is ahardy contender, we must remember that varietyis the spice of life. and the hamantashsure brings variety. i mean, who doesn't lovea good poppy seed cookie, or how about apricot? even the prune onesget things moving. now this debate has beengoing on for 70 years and although tonight mayhave favored the latke, i have faith that nextyear the hamantash

will make a strong andimpressive showing. over the years, we've hadsomewhere around 250 debaters on this stage. and that, of course, meansat least 500 opinions on the matter. but that really is thebeauty of the debate: asking the big,important questions and concluding nothing. i'd like to thankhal for hosting

and the esteemed debatersfor their compelling latke presentations. i think we all learned a lot. thank you to jen kennedy andkristy owens from the reynolds club, and the seminary co-opbookstore for their support. thank you to carl fogel forhis accompaniment this evening, and uchicago creativefor their help in making this event availableto people across the country. i would especiallylike to thank all

of our volunteers formaking the event possible, and rachel jackson forher striking designs. and finally, i would liketo extend an immense amount of gratitude to rebekahmogilevsky for all of her hard work inmaking tonight happen. dahlia leffell: i wouldnow like to invite you all to taste for yourselves whothe true winners should be, and join us here for areception in hutchinson commons where you can sample latkesand hamantaschen alike.

remember also to votefor your favorite on the inserts inyour pamphlets. and now if i couldask you to please remain seated while ourdebaters process out. thank you all for coming, andhave a happy thanksgiving.