Chutzpah: It Isn't Just for Jews Any More

If it ever was

A recent news story illustrates the concept of chutzpah, a Yiddish word defined as “the defining quality of a man who, on trial for killing his parents, begs the judge for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.”

The story is headlined “Woman who wrote book on grief following husband's death accused of his murder.” It has been alleged that a certain Kouri Richins of Salt Lake City tried more than once to poison her husband with fentanyl, finally succeeded—and then published and promoted a children’s book about processing grief. Watch her promote it on Good Things Utah.

Assuming the allegations are true (which is not always a safe assumption when it comes to mainstream media stories) it would seem that Kouri Richins, who is probably not Jewish, still somehow managed to develop plenty of chutzpah.

Some readers may be asking “What makes you think she isn’t Jewish?” Well, there are only 6,000 Jews in the entire state of Utah. Richins isn’t a Jewish name. She doesn’t sound Jewish in her TV interview. And what kind of Jew names their daughter Kouri?

Another non-Jew with chutzpah is the soon-to-be-indicted Congressman George Santos. Santos has so much chutzpah he got elected to Congress by not only pretending to be a Jew, but a gay Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivor (as well as a volleyball star, a college graduate with several degrees, and various other things he is not).

Yet another poster boy for goy chutzpah is Dick Cheney, who bragged that the “highest moment” of his career as vice president was “9/11 itself”—presumably the hour he spent commanding the US air defense stand-down, even screaming in the face of a puzzled young military attaché that “of course the (stand-down) order still stands! Have you heard anything different?” Cheney not only had the chutzpah to arrange to become acting commander-in-chief during the 9/11 false flag, and later to repeatedly lie with wildly mutually contradictory stories about where he was and what he was doing that day, but finally to go on television eight years later and call 9/11 the “highest moment” of his de facto presidency.

These and other examples prove conclusively that goys can have chutzpah. Yes, I know the ultimate poster boy for 9/11 chutzpah is the very Jewish Larry Silverstein. But Cheney gave Silverstein a pretty good run for his (doubled and redoubled insurance) money.

My anti-Jewish readers (don’t call them anti-Semites, because Arabs are the real Semites) are probably trying to think of a way to blame the Jews for chutzpah, like they blame them for everything else. I’ve heard anti-Jewish people offer the theory that the reason only one culture has a word for chutzpah is that it’s so common in that community, sort of like the way Eskimos need words for snow. So they might argue that the chutzpah epidemic sweeping America and infecting people like Kouri Richins and George Santos and Dick Cheney was brewing on the shtetl for ages before it escaped and went viral.

But I think chutzpah is American as proverbial apple pie. Long before Melville wrote The Confidence-man, con artists with plenty of chutzpah, hailing from diverse ethnic backgrounds, were descending on these shores. America was a place where people could invent and re-invent themselves. And back in those days, when somebody like George Santos offered an inflated biography, it was a lot harder to check.

And let’s not forget that in its original Yiddish meaning, chutzpah has a strongly negative connotation. It isn’t, or wasn’t, used as a compliment. But today, as the term has gotten loose into the larger American world, people sometimes use it as a kind of backhanded compliment. “Wow, that Trump has some chutzpah, bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, and then sticking by his claim that rich guys can do that in his rape trial deposition. I think I’ll vote for him.”

So I would argue that not only is chutzpah not just for Jews any more, but that it never was. Readers are free, as always, to disagree with me in the comments section.