Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

***

A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

New York: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and S.Y. Agnon’s The Lady and the Peddler get double billing starting Thursday, when La MaMa theater group debuts performances by the Israel-based Nephesh Theater (Through Jan. 29, showtimes, $18). Also premiering Thursday is Lazarre Seymour Simckes’ latest play Open Rehearsal, which tells the tale of a Jewish family clamoring for the spotlight—literally, since the play takes place as though it were what the title says (through Feb. 5, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m., $12). A highlight of the ongoing Times Square International Theater Festival is self-described Isramerican Sivan Hadari’s ensemble piece 1,934 Days, which features 10 actors of different nationalities reading monologues inspired by soldier Gilad Shalit’s return to Israel—and a Gavin Degraw song (Jan. 18 and Jan 21, 10 p.m.; Jan. 22, 6 p.m.,  $18).

Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner meet again at NYU’s Skirball Center, discussing Sondheim’s new lyric anthology to a sold-out crowd (Jan. 17, 8 p.m., check back for ticket availability). On Tuesday, the 92Y kicks off programming centered around its new exhibit on the culture of Terezin with a performance  by chamber group Nash Ensemble and Wolfgang Holzmair (Jan. 17, 8 p.m., from $38).

Frank London joins Tablet contributor Jake Marmer to celebrate the release of Marmer’s new book, Jazz Talmud, with a concert at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in New York’s East Village (Jan 19, 8 p.m., $10).

Elsewhere: Further south, the North Carolina Art Museum’s exhibit, Rembrandt in America (the show’s only East Coast venue) is in its final weeks, so mosey down to Raleigh as soon as you can (through Jan. 22, $18). In Seattle, Shirley Lauro’s play All Through the Night begins its three-week run. The play tells the stories of four young German women–Ludmilla, Gretchen, Angelika, and Friederike–growing up under Nazism (Through Feb. 12, showtimes, $34.50).

Judy Gold brings her brash comic act to the West Coast, performing Saturday at San Diego’s Jewish Community Center (Jan. 14, 8 p.m., $27). Also performing in Cali that night, north of San Francisco, is Joan Rivers, so choose wisely (Jan. 14, 8 p.m., from $30). Finally, this week’s best-named event takes place Saturday morning in Los Angeles, when Charles Perry discusses “A Thousand and One Fritters: Food in the Arabian Nights”–specifically, what all the food mentioned in Tales From the Thousand and One Nights actually was (Dec. 14, 10:30 a.m., free).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

The National Museum of the Jewish People, as the plans call it, would occupy a delicate structure tucked into a hidden courtyard between a new hotel in the hulking, turreted Old Post Office building and the equally imposing headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service next door. “We would be the tail wagging the dog,” said Julius Kaplan, a Washington lawyer who is chairman of the decade-old nonprofit devoted to the museum effort, in a phone interview last week. The museum’s website mentions support from prominent Jewish figures—Elie Wiesel, Itzhak Perlman—as well as less-obvious supporters like Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, Jamsheed Marker, who along with Wiesel and Perlman is listed as an honorary trustee. For the bid, Kaplan recruited Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Berlin Jewish Museum, who imagined an angular building surrounded by a tiered garden that would include an elevated High Line-style bower over an arcade threaded between the two landmark buildings and out to the street, where visitors would be welcomed with a sign in Hebrew reading pardes—a word frequently interpreted to mean Eden.

What wonders might fill this particular Jewish paradise, should it come to fruition, are a little harder to discern. The project’s backers advertise a handful of existing public commitments—including a promise from Arlette Snyder, mother of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, to donate her late husband’s music memorabilia, described as “covering every genre from classical music to the Beastie Boys”—but the general curatorial approach seems to owe something to Field of Dreams: Build it, and they will donate. The museum will have to compete with the existing Judaica collections of Washington’s most august institutions, from the Smithsonian to the Library of Congress—and, for ephemera, with Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened last year. “God forbid you create something mediocre and put it in Washington,” said Michael Berenbaum, who oversaw the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum two decades ago and is now a professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. “You either have to do something that is grand and world-class in terms of size, scope, and mandate, or you have to create a boutique museum, a small gem.”

The idea man behind the museum proposal is Ori Soltes, a lecturer in theology and fine arts at Georgetown University, who has been fighting for an independent Jewish museum in the capital since the late 1990s, when he was director of the small Judaica museum held by B’nai B’rith, a no-longer-displayed collection of donations made over the years by the organization’s patrons and items held in trust for other foundations. Soltes, who has a wild corona of salt-and-pepper curls and the didactic energy of a children’s show host, talks excitedly about multimedia or holographic installations that would allow visitors to bat against Sandy Koufax, and the museum project’s Web site mentions a similar idea for re-enacting chess matches played by Bobby Fischer—never mind the grandmaster’s later paranoid fantasies of being pursued by world Jewry. The list of proposed curatorial departments runs the gamut from art and literature to economics, media, and the law.

When we met earlier this month at a coffee shop in Georgetown, Soltes told me he also envisions space devoted to exhibits digitally recreating lost synagogues and temporary shows bolstered with public programs exploring the interplay between Jewish communities and the cultures into which they settled around the world, from Morocco or Poland or China to the United States. “We want to explore how the Jewish people have been involved in the societies where they’ve lived, which is everywhere,” Soltes said. “The job of the museum is to keep asking the question without an answer—what’s Jewish?”

Soltes cheerfully acknowledges that he and Kaplan don’t have much to start with by way of a permanent collection. Aside from the music memorabilia, announced commitments include an array of miniature menorahs collected by Kaplan, plus paintings by Jewish artists collected by Baron Oscar Ghez, the founder of Geneva’s Petit Palais Museum. But Soltes seems undaunted. “There is a lot of stuff out there,” Soltes told me. “People call me all the time saying they have stuff to give.”

There is an obvious prize: the B’nai B’rith’s now-homeless collection. In the 1990s, the Klutznick National Jewish Museum occupied the second floor of the B’nai B’rith’s former headquarters near Dupont Circle. It has not been formally displayed since B’nai B’rith sold that building, in 2002, and moved to smaller offices. But even before that, Soltes, who was director from 1991 until 1998, had ideas about the Klutznick collection’s potential as an independent attraction. He worked to raise the museum’s profile both in Washington and among Jewish institutions, joining museum associations and building an independent board to oversee dedicated fundraising efforts under the larger B’nai B’rith umbrella. One of those board members was Kaplan, a member of Washington’s Explorers’ Club who told me that, aside from representing Israel on trade matters in Washington, he’d had very little involvement in organized Jewish life prior to signing on with Soltes but had found himself captivated by a show at the Klutznick exploring Jewish influence on Moroccan culture. According to Soltes, he and Kaplan made repeated overtures to executives at B’nai B’rith in hopes of partnering on an independent museum, but the idea never gained traction. Gwen Zuares, chair of B’nai B’rith’s Center for Jewish Culture, said in an interview that the organization is actively pursuing discussions with potential partners for the Klutznick, but she declined to disclose details.

In any case, Kaplan says, his vision for what a Jewish museum in Washington could be has always been more expansive than simply repackaging the existing B’nai B’rith collection. “I’ve always felt from the beginning that the B’nai B’rith museum was an interesting undertaking, but it didn’t have the Weltanschauung, as the Germans would say, to complement the Holocaust museum,” he said in our phone conversation. “The Holocaust having a major presence in Washington only shows one side of the coin, the tragic side of Jewish history, and I thought the other side of the coin, the uplifting side of Jews’ contributions to world civilization, deserved equal footing.”

When the federal government moved early in the Bush Administration to redevelop the Old Post Office, Kaplan recognized the potential for a golden museum location in the courtyard. “I could not justify gobbling the entirety of the project, but I could see gobbling the site of the annex,” Kaplan told me. He struck up a partnership with Norman Groh, a Virginia-based hotel developer best known for building a $1,400-a-night suite at a Holiday Inn outside Washington in 1972. Groh brought Hyatt into the partnership. (Hyatt referred questions about the proposal to Groh, whom they described as its sponsor; Groh, when reached by telephone, declined to comment until after the government announces the winner of the bid.)

In 2003, Kaplan incorporated the nonprofit for the museum, then known as the National Museum of Jewish Heritage. Along with Kaplan and Soltes, the board included Janice Blumberg, who had been active in supporting the Klutznick at B’nai B’rith; Claude Ghez, son of the Swiss collector Baron Oscar Ghez; and Frank Abramoff, Jack Abramoff’s father, who had offered to help fundraise in California, where he lived. Jack Abramoff had tried to secure the Old Post Office site for one of his Native American tribal clients. That fact subsequently became the centerpiece of the federal government’s case against one of Abramoff’s associates, David Safavian, who was involved with the initial stages of the Old Post Office bid process as chief of staff of the Government Services Administration in the first Bush Administration. Once the Native American project foundered, Kaplan said, Jack Abramoff encouraged him to talk to his father about the museum. “He did mention to me that his father loved the idea of a Jewish museum,” Kaplan told me in our phone conversation. The former lobbyist was never involved in the Jewish museum project. “I wanted to be supportive, but it was a little far afield for me,” Jack Abramoff told me in a phone interview earlier this week. “I was never involved.”

The government solicited interest in the Old Post Office complex in 2005, but it never moved to a formal bid process, leaving the project in limbo. The next year, Claude Ghez and Frank Abramoff, who had been vice-president of the museum nonprofit’s board, both stepped down as directors, and the project’s funding dwindled to less than $6,000, according to tax records. Nevertheless, Kaplan and Soltes, by then emotionally invested in the Pennsylvania Avenue location, didn’t look elsewhere for space, even in the midst of the of the subsequent real-estate collapse. “We were waiting for Godot,” Soltes told me. “We felt that if we left this project, we’d be starting from scratch.”

The Old Post Office languished until earlier this year, when the District of Columbia’s delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, pushed the General Services Administration to prioritize its redevelopment in response to President Barack Obama’s request that the government privatize $8 billion in federal real-estate holdings by the end of 2012. Now there is nothing to do but wait. “I don’t have any intention of pursuing this further,” Kaplan told me. “I am going to be 78 years old and I don’t have another 12 years to devote to the museum’s creation.”

The Truman Project, which Kleinfeld founded in 2004, is a testament to her ability to work the establishment while positioning herself outside of it. Modeled after conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, which over the last several decades have functioned as clubhouses for policymakers devoted to advancing the ideas and policy proposals that underpin the modern conservative movement, the Truman Project’s goal is to provide a left-leaning counterpart, focused specifically on foreign policy. Its members-only network of insiders, known as Truman Security Fellows, share progressive views on security issues and are moving into positions to influence what gets done; it now links staffers scattered throughout various Beltway offices—the White House and Congress, the departments of State and Defense, various think tanks and advocacy groups. “It’s the best place by a mile to find out who are the young up and comers in foreign policy,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Truman adviser who until last February was the director of policy planning in the State Department. “There are Truman people all over the place.”

The roster of young Truman fellows in high places includes Matthew Spence, who co-founded Truman with Kleinfeld and is now a senior aide to Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Eric Lesser, who until he left for Harvard Law this summer worked in the White House, first as David Axelrod’s right-hand man and then as director of strategic planning for the Council of Economic Advisers. (He also organized the annual White House Seder.) Others have worked in the Department of Homeland Security, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Pentagon offices of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are journalists, like Patrick Radden Keefe, and analyst-bloggers like Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations. And there are people like Liz McNally, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who worked as a speechwriter for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq—and who, in August, wound up on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The New Greatest Generation.”

But rather than following her cohort into government after Obama’s election in 2008, Kleinfeld says she turned down offers to join the administration, choosing instead to remain at Truman, bolstering her position as gatekeeper and ringleader of the Truman network. She earned a spot last year on Time magazine’s listing of the top 40 rising stars under 40 in American politics, alongside Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin (better-known as the wife of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, frequently mentioned as a future Republican presidential contender. In each of our conversations, Kleinfeld cited her penchant for juggling multiple projects at once—currently, writing policy briefs, op-eds, and books, consulting on international rule-of-law issues, and running Truman—as one reason she has stayed out of government service. “I do my best work when I’m juggling a lot of things,” she said when we met over the summer at her Truman office. “But when you take a government job, it is all-consuming.” And not just professionally. “I’m not a Washington workaholic,” Kleinfeld told me in a phone call. “I believe very much in stopping work at 7 p.m., at the latest.”

***

In person, Kleinfeld retains a hint of the gawky, precocious teenager she once was behind her polished, professional exterior of tamed brown curls, set off by luminous blue-green eyes. She grew up in what she describes as a log cabin off a dirt road in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her Harvard-educated father sits as a federal judge. She rode her considerable charm and intellect to the East Coast, where she matriculated as an undergraduate in Yale’s prestigious Directed Studies program. She went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and eventually earned a doctorate there in international relations before turning her attention to organizing her fellow academics and policy wonks—many of them young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq—and connecting them with the people trying to reformulate progressive national-security policy for a post-Sept. 11 world. “It’s self-indulgent to just craft beautiful policy,” she told me in that phone conversation. “I was frustrated that good policy kept getting blocked by bad politics.”

Kleinfeld’s thoughtful, independent-minded, and contradictory personality was shaped by her Alaskan childhood. She describes herself as the kind of kid who both read everything she could and spent her free time writing away to humanitarian causes but also liked tools and drove a truck in the woods near her home—a self-possessed young girl in the mold of Ramona Quimby, the Beverly Cleary character. She was, her parents say, always an organizer. “Whenever anyone had anything that had to be managed or administered, they’d turn to Rachel,” said her father, Andrew Kleinfeld, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her mother, Judith, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, tried for a while to get her only daughter interested in pursuing science, but failed. “She thought calculus would be useless,” Judith Kleinfeld said. “Then she realized she could use it to do the measurements for the curtains for her prom.”

Between S&P, Elena Kagan, and Michele Bachmann, “chutzpah” is now ranking higher on Google Trends than at any time since the great spike of 2007, caused by a perfect storm of a Bush aide calling out the Clintons over the Scooter Libby affair and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requesting permission to visit ground zero. Indeed, if Google’s search insights are any indication, “chutzpah” consistently out-performs the “cojones” that are sometimes invoked in its place—and is a runaway winner in Washington. (The main exception was in August 2010, when Sarah Palin, yet another potential president, accused President Barack Obama of having a nether profile more suited to a Ken doll than to a leader, and cojones were “on everybody’s lips,” as CNN’s Jeanne Moos put it.) While more Americans are familiar with Spanish than with Yiddish—a simple Google search yields 12.5 million entries for “cojones,” a mere 2.7 million for “chutzpah”—and more people are thus likely to require an explanation or definition for a use of “chutzpah,” there is a simple reason why neither term should replace the other: Real chutzpah is not the same thing as cojones.

It takes only five letters and a few inches of human anatomy to get from balls to gall, but it’s a distance that makes all the difference in the world. A person might need balls to behave with chutzpah, but those metaphorical balls are only the springboard for the concrete act of chutzpah itself. Balls alone aren’t enough; real chutzpah needs balls, as they’d say in England, that also have some neck on them. None of the writers mentioned above is talking about simple testicular fortitude.

The root meaning of “chutzpah” is “to be insolent or impudent,” and “chutzpah” has come into Yiddish with the same meaning as it has in Hebrew: “impudence, insolence, nerve,” to quote Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. There’s nothing good about chutzpah in Yiddish; it’s an unambiguously negative quality characterized by a disregard for manners, social conventions, and the feelings and opinions of others. The chutzpahnik’s self-regard and sense of entitlement are so total that he’s unable to see that other people are just as real as he is. (If he’s a she, the chutzpahnik is called a chutzpahnitseh.) Chutzpah comes to your house for dinner and takes a dump in your potted plant; if it goes to its best friend’s funeral and then propositions the bereaved spouse during the shiva, it’s only because there was no chance to do so at the graveside.

Chutzpah shows complete disdain for everyone else’s intelligence; it believes that other people have been put on earth only to do the chutzpahnik’s will and serve as his suckers; sovereign power without a crown, Rashi once called it. Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein were not the only writers to accuse Standard & Poor’s of chutzpah when it downgraded government debt, and I doubt that many readers were surprised when both of them cited what Klein, in his Washington Post blog on August 6, called “the old joke about chutzpah”: a young man murders his parents “and then pleads for leniency because he’s an orphan.” Krugman, in his New York Times column the next day promoted Klein’s joke to illustrative anecdote and said that “chutzpah” is “traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents,” and so on.

Krugman and Klein are falling back on Jewish tradition, a tradition reaching back through through punk, way beyond disco, all the way to 1968 and the first flowering of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, when Leo Rosten, long famous as the author of The Education of Hyman Kaplan, presented the same story in The Joys of Yiddish as “the classic definition of chutzpa [sic].” So far as I’m aware, Rosten was the first to link this story to the notion of chutzpah; rather than quote a classic definition, he quietly created one by adapting a little-known text to the needs of the moment. Neither Talmudic, midrashic, nor even vaguely rabbinic, Rosten’s source tells the story of a 14-year-old boy “who deliberately murdered his father and mother in cold blood with a meat-axe.” He’s found guilty by a jury, and the judge asks him if he has anything to say before sentencing. The boy replies, “Why no … I think I haven’t, though I hope yer Honor will show some consideration FOR THE FEELINGS OF A POOR ORPHAN” (the capital letters are Ward’s).

Rosten’s source is set in Arkansas, not Warsaw; Rosten calls it classic because he’s borrowed it from the work of Artemus Ward, whom Mark Twain called “America’s greatest humorist.” Ward died in 1867 and probably never heard the word “chutzpah” in his life. Rosten’s definition is classic, all right, classic American humor that he circumcised into a piece of traditional Jewish lore without mentioning Ward’s name even once. Chutzpah is as chutzpah does—it’s as American as apple pie or Spanish balls.

Rosten doesn’t quote Ward’s final sentence, in which “the perfect young wretch” is sentenced, presumably to death, but Ward had managed to catch the dismay that typifies the usual Yiddish reaction to instances of chutzpah. The common English-language use of the term to denote an admirable display of nerve, courage, or independence of spirit in the face of outmoded, inefficient, or unimaginative ways of doing things—chutzpah as cojones—isn’t shared with any Jewish languages. Although Rabbi Nachman tells us the Babylonian Talmud says “chutzpah pays, even against heaven,” he’s generally thought to be speaking ironically; he’s talking about Balaam, who manages to get God to grant him permission to go off with representatives of the Moabite king to curse the Israelites. When it comes time to do the cursing, though, God puts a blessing into Balaam’s mouth, and Balak, the king of Moab, refuses to fork over the fee Balaam had been promised—some pay-off.

When a classical Hebrew text uses “chutzpah” to mean “cojones”—courage, guts, gumption—it does so only ironically. A midrash about the binding of Isaac has Isaac tell Abraham to tie down his hands and feet because “the life-force is full of chutzpah,” not easily vanquished or discouraged; that is, the life force never says die until it’s already dead. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, “Rabbi Ze’era said, Come and see what chutzpah the land of Israel has, that it produces fruit”—in spite of all the devastation that it has undergone.

The irony at play in the Talmud reaches its fullest development in Yiddish. If someone were to say that Alexander the Great showed plenty of chutzpah when he cut through the Gordian knot instead of trying to untie it, that someone would be adopting the view of Alexander’s competitors and opponents; as far as Alexander and his supporters were concerned, Alexander did the smart thing. Likewise, if we say that Rosa Parks showed plenty of chutzpah when she refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus, we use the racist point of view to mock the racist idea that Parks had the unmitigated gall to behave as if—can you believe it?—she were white. English-speakers unaware of the irony underlying such uses of “chutzpah” in Yiddish or Yiddish-influenced English simply ascribed a new, highly positive meaning to the term.

It probably says something depressing about the state of public life today that the only such ironic, “positive” use of “chutzpah” that I’ve noticed in all the recent flurry is a piece on ESPN.com about Seattle Mariners’ right fielder, Ichiro Suzuki, whose chutzpah seems to lie in his insistence on acting like Ichiro, even in the face of a recent slump. I don’t know if Johnette Howard, the article’s author, speaks any Yiddish, but she certainly knows how to tweak a chutzpah.

Howard aside, this sudden upswing in the fortunes of classic chutzpah might well be a sign of good—possibly even rapturously good—things to come. On the last page of tractate Sotah we are told that “in the days immediately preceding the advent of the Messiah, chutzpah will increase.” I’m going to start looking for a frum guy’s face on every taco and Pop-Tart I eat.

Michael Wex’s most recent book, a novel, is The Frumkiss Family Business.

As prime minister, Harper has transformed Canadian foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Abandoning Canada’s longstanding posture of even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the country has become arguably the most pro-Israel country in the world. From being the first world leader to cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority in 2006 when it was taken over by Hamas, to speaking out against growing global anti-Semitism, Harper has embraced Israel as has no Canadian leader before him. “It is hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days,” gushed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in 2010. “No other country in the world has demonstrated such a full understanding of us.”

While Harper’s pro-Israel bona fides are not in doubt, his motivations have been less clear. In political terms, Harper may not stand to gain much by adopting such a passionately pro-Israel stance. In a country of nearly 34 million, Canadian Jews number only 315,000—and that figure is declining. In fact, Jews were the only ethnic group in Canada to show a decline nationally according to the 2006 census, a trend that shows no sign of reversing. In contrast, the number of Canadian Muslims is expected to nearly triple in the next 20 years, from about 940,000 in 2010 to nearly 2.7 million in 2030, according to the Pew Research Center. There are also nearly 500,000 Canadian Arabs, a somewhat overlapping group. Clearly, if there is an emerging demographic to be captured for partisan purposes, Jews are not it.

Of course, sheer numbers are only one measure of a minority’s clout. “Canada’s Israel lobby is every bit as powerful as America’s,” says John Mearsheimer, co-author of the controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, even though Canada’s national elections are publicly funded, making financial contributions far less important in the Canadian political system than in the United States. Brent Sasley, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Arlington who studies Canadian ethnic demographics, agrees that Canadian Jews have been more successful lobbyists than their Arab and Muslim counterparts but argues that historical factors above all are responsible. “Put simply, Jews have had a much longer history of acclimatization into the Canadian economic, social, and political environment,” Sasley has written.

But Harper seems to be acting out of personal conviction. According to Gerry Nicholls, who worked with Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative economic organization, from 1997 to 2001, the future prime minister was praising Israel in those days, too. “Though our group didn’t really deal with foreign policy, he was always very clear that he believed Canada should be a loyal, true ally of Israel,” says Nicholls. “There was no political calculation then, no votes to be had.”

For all Harper’s undeniable success in making himself attractive to a broad coalition of voters in Canada, he also emerged from a very distinct social and political milieu that might be more familiar to Americans than to many Canadians. Though born in Toronto, Harper moved soon after high school to work in the oil industry in the western province of Alberta. He received his bachelor and master’s degree in economics at the University of Calgary there, and he represented the local riding, or county subdivision, in parliament. Though most Americans think of Canada as a European-style social democracy, Harper’s Alberta in many ways shares a political and economic climate in tune with pro-business U.S. states. Buoyed by oil reserves, the province follows behind only Texas and Delaware in measures of economic liberalization in North America, according to one study. Alberta also boasts Canada’s strongest support for loose gun laws, opposition to same-sex marriage, and support for the death penalty. In 1997, Harper called Canada “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.” In 2003, Alberta’s right-wing Premier Ralph Klein sent a letter to President George W. Bush expressing support for the Iraq War. Harper and another prominent conservative Albertan, Stockwell Day, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2003 calling Canada’s position to opt out of the war a mistake, a position that was highly unpopular in other parts of the country.

Harper’s strong feelings for Israel can be seen as consistent with his distinctly conservative background and worldview. He believes Israel is a bulwark of democracy and Western civilization warring against terrorists in a region governed by brutal autocrats. The prime minister said at an Ottawa conference on anti-Semitism in 2010 that he supports Israel “not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israel mob tells us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are in the longer term a threat to all of us.” Harper’s support for the current leadership of the Jewish state is perfectly in line with his other beliefs, then, that share similarities with the Republican Party’s agenda in the United States. Shrewd politician that he is, however, Harper is fully aware that many of Canada’s liberal laws—on health care and abortion, for instance—are untouchable for any party aspiring to majority status. On Israel, by contrast, the prime minister has been able to transform Canadian policy with very little opposition.

Harper began steering Canada in a pro-Israel direction soon after taking office in early 2006. During that summer’s skirmish between Israel and Hezbollah, the prime minister defended Israel’s right to defend itself, blamed Hezbollah for the war and civilian deaths in Lebanon, and rejected widespread calls for an immediate ceasefire. In 2008, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations presented Harper with its inaugural International Leadership Award for boycotting the Durban II Conference, a U.N. conference against racism, and for consistently siding with Israel at the United Nations. Harper said in 2008 that global anti-Semitism was rising and that “anti-Israeli sentiment, [is] really just a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, which I think is completely unacceptable.” Most recently, in May, Harper maneuvered to keep a G8 statement from specifically calling for talks based on a return to Israel’s 1967 borders, plus land swaps negotiated with Palestinians, an idea pressed by President Barack Obama. Haaretz reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called Harper to veto inclusion of the language, though Harper’s office denied the claim. In early 2010, Harper’s Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent declared that any attack on Israel would be assumed to be an attack on Canada, a statement Kent clarified as reflecting the prime minister’s personal feelings.

The changes in Canadian foreign policy have not gone unnoticed by Israel or its critics. Al Jazeera aired a documentary last year titled The Other Special Relationship on the Canada-Israel alliance. After Canada recently lost a bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, Harper suggested it was because of the country’s stalwart defense of Israel.

For the prime minister, however, it was a small price to pay. “Whether it is at the United Nations or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric,” Harper said. “As long as I am prime minister, whether it is at the U.N. or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take a stand whatever the cost.”

Jordan Michael Smith, a Canadian writer living in Washington, has written for the Forward, Jewcy, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Newsweek.

But it’s worth noting that the J Street crowd has, this week, appeared wholly uninterested in the minutiae and insider baseball that animates the Hill. At last night’s big $250-a-plate gala dinner, the 800-plus attendees cheered when recognizable members of Congress in attendance were named—Barney Frank, Keith Ellison—but kept up their chatter as lesser pols were thanked. And few people in the room seemed to notice when speaker Steve Clemons—who directs the foreign-policy program at the New America Foundation, a progressive think tank—let slip that Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican who gave the evening’s keynote address, had been tapped to co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board. (Though in fairness, they may not have been paying attention in part because Clemons walked onstage wearing a paper mask of Vice President Joe Biden’s face, in a Beltway Halloween joke that went over like a lead weight).

Attendees did, however, sit rapt as King Abdullah of Jordan congratulated their efforts via a video link. And the audience whooped and cheered later in the evening when one of J Street’s initial funders, New York attorney Victor Kovner, accepted the organization’s inaugural “Pursuer of Peace” award. Kovner, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, was introduced with a video tribute that included photographs of Kovner standing with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (not both in the same photograph, though). In his acceptance, he invoked both the U.S. Constitution and the prophet Isaiah as he talked about making sure that the state of Israel lives up to Jewish values, rather than just being a state full of Jews. “What we American Jews owe to Israel, what we owe to our friends and family in Israel, is our best advice,” he said, to loud applause. And then he wound up with a finale worthy of Elie Wiesel, repeatedly intoning “never again” as he said that, thanks to J Street’s existence, members of Congress would be free of fear when taking positions in favor of Palestinian rights, and the president would have the room to maneuver in order to strike a peace deal. Now that the conference is over, of course, the big question facing the organization is this: what next?

Hagel to Lead Obama’s Intelligence Oversight Panel [The Cable]