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Hi there. Eat latkes. In New York, you can stage your own version of the great Second Avenue Deli versus Veselka debate. (Your editor chooses Kiev.) Or you can stop in at Lansky's, the back-room speakeasy lounge at Ratner's, for some upscale yiddesheh dining. In San Francisco, there's Moxie, a haute Eastern European bistro that attracts hipsters and middle-aged folk. Or find your own in your city at our top Jewish picks!

Latke recipes are a huge source of obsessiveness, self-righteousness and control-freakitude. Should one rinse the grated potatoes? Does one press out the moisture with a paper towel? Onion or no? Is a food processor permissible or must the latkes be laced with bloody knuckle chunks to be kosher? According to halakhic expert Professor Raphael Finkel of the University of Kentucky, one must "slaughter the potato with a quick double cut, holding the knife so the blade is facing up, attacking the potato from underneath. If there are any eyes on the potato, they must be facing up, so the potato doesn't see the knife coming. The stroke must sever at least the main artery of the potato, although according to Rambam, this is difficult with our modern potatoes, which have no arteries."

The latke's place of honor in the Jewish culinary pantheon is challenged by only one other foodstuff: the hamentash. (If our non-Jewish friends are still with us--ha! as if!--the hamentash is the tricornered isocelean pastry filled with prune, poppy or jam substance we eat on Purim, which is another holiday, one deserving its own column as it celebrates drunkenness even more than it does pigging out.) Jews through the ages have debated the relative merits of hamentashen and latkes.

What do Jews do on Christmas? That's a secret. Wait, no it's not!

Even academia has gotten in on the act. The University of Chicago has held annual latke vs. hamentash symposia for the last half-century; last year's 50th-anniversary celebration attracted more than 900 students, faculty, and starch-loving townies. This past Purim, Mount Holyoke joined the fray. According to the college's public affairs office, one professor argued for the hamentash side in a triangular g-string, positing that the pastry is a more appropriate taste treat for a woman's school given the its similarity to the female anatomy, and yes, this is what higher education has come to. A psychology professor countered with Pavlov's research on salivating dogs, which indicated that circular stimuli (aka latkes) induced more doggie drool than triangular stimuli (aka hamentashen). His latke-teammate, an economics professor, admitted he'd never actually seen either food until that day but nonetheless "invoked complex economic theories and argued that 'the hamantasch alleges a center that will hold, but we know in this society that the center will not hold.'" Tuition at Mount Holyoke is $21, 250 a year.

The fact that Mt. Holyoke even allows the latke to claim it is a woman-empowering tuber is a shandeh, Professor Robin Leidner would argue. In her seminal paper, "Latke vs Hamentash: A Materialist-Feminist Analysis," Leidner eloquently argues that the odor of latkes frying is the rancid smell of oppression. Her contribution to latke scholarship is so brilliant, I wish I'd written it.

Even though she's wrong. I may not be able to invoke her fancy-pants academic language, but I know from tasty. And I have a Cuisinart and I'm not afraid to use it.