The voyage of the bagel
Authors: Katz Elihu , Feldman Jacob J. 
Published: April 2009

My first job, from the mid-1950s, was at the University of Chicago, cradle of the social sciences, the Great Books program, the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, many Nobel Prizes, and the Latke-Hamantasch Debates. The Debates were the brainchild of the legendary Maurice Pekarsky, director of the Hillel Foundation, who sought to rekindle identity among Jewish students and faculty, to promote ecumenical dialog on campus, but also to provide relief from the end-term exams - maybe even from the Cold War. Each year in mid-December, Pekarsky would unleash five or six faculty members to present learned papers on the relative merits of the round, flat, potato pancake (latke) associated - who knows why? - with the holiday of Hanukkah and the triangular tart hamantasch (literally, Haman’s pouch, or, in Hebrew, Haman’s ear) associated with Purim, the carnivalesque Feast of Esther, heroine of the outrageous biblical book of the same name. Forty years later, I understand that the event is more popular than ever - at Chicago, and at the other universities to which it has diffused. Even in my time, the Debates would easily have outdrawn the Homecoming football game - if Chicago had had a football team! The most staid members of the faculty continue to vie with each other to be invited to speak, and the audience of students - eager to be assured that their chosen disciplines are equal to the challenge - has outgrown the largest of the meeting halls on campus.

Over the years, the latke has been proven the more democratic, more egalitarian, more other-directed, more feminine, more ‘sacred’ (the halo), warmer and more folksy (more gemeinschaft, in a word), while the hegemonic hamantasch has been variously dubbed (by proponents and opponents alike) more aristocratic, more hierarchical, more technologically advanced, more inner-directed, cooler, and perhaps more masculine (although there are widely different opinions on this point). It is incontrovertible that television is the medium of choice of the gregarious latke-lover, while the asocial hamantasch muncher can usually be found behind a newspaper.

Marking the Darwin Centennial Year, the Debates of 1959 addressed Darwinian themes; hence ‘The Voyage of the Bagel’. Bibliographers may find interesting - it had not occurred to me until now - that in the year following (1960), the authors of the present paper were commissioned to research the inauguration of another genre of Debates - between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon (Katz and Feldman, 1962).

It’s a little late in the day for me to feign modesty, so I will say outright that I was invited to speak on five such occasions during the 1950s and 1960s, and that these (heretofore unpublished) essays are my best work. I was reminded of them some months ago in apprehensive anticipation of a retirement party that was organized in my memory (Liebes and Curran, 1998). Dusted, photocopied and bound together, I presented them to participants and friends as a desk-top production. Both then and now, they evoked more friendly response than most of my academic contributions - but none more gratifying than John Hartley’s pronouncement that the essays qualify as pre-historic ‘cultural studies’. I leave the canonization to him.