For years Mr. and Mrs. W., the richest couple in our Vancouver synagogue congregation, reserved the seats next to my family’s for the High Holidays. But the W’s were never there. Rumor had it that they attended the Orthodox shul up the street where, the men and women being separated, Mr. W. was better able to engage in sotto voce sports chatter and business deals during services.

Instead of Mr. and Mrs. W., it was their United Jewish Appeal pledge cards—with tabs for a $25, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or $2,000 donation—that occupied their places. At one point during the service, the rabbi would invite everyone to fold the tab representing the amount they wanted to pledge and pass their cards to volunteers in the center aisle. Every year from age eight to thirteen, I folded the $2,000 tab on each of the Ws’ cards and passed them on. And every year when, two months later, I checked the synagogue bulletin’s list of contributors, I discovered that the W’s had indeed honored the pledge when a letter came shortly after the Holidays asking congregants to send in the cheque they had promised. After all, what were the W’s going to do? To deny that they had made the pledge would have been to admit to the UJA that they weren’t in shul. And $4,000 a year was nothing to them.

One year I told my father, who was sitting next to me with his nose buried in the Pentateuch, what I had surreptitiously been doing. He didn’t get angry; he just said that I had “chutzpah.” Perhaps he was pleased to see it sprouting in me after generations of family mildness. About a month before, we had flown to Toronto to visit my paternal grandparents. There—hanging on the wall outside my grandfather’s home office—I discovered a picture frame containing a needle, a thimble, and a $5.00 bill belonging to my great grandfather, a tailor who had emigrated to Vancouver from Russia around 1910. “Was that great-grandpa Ben’s first needle, and his first thimble, and the first $5.00 he earned in Canada?,” I asked.

No, my grandfather replied. Ben was a self-effacing soul who barely kept his head above water, always diminishing his own desires, abilities, and general footprint on the planet so as to avoid even giving the impression that he ever inflated them above those of others—including customers and competitors. All his life he labored under his own particular variant of what Freud called the “exquisite Jewish phenomenon” of self-loathing: a tendency to look upon himself as he thought gentiles did, as a little guy with strange, even embarrassing traditions and habits whose claims on the world had better stay within limits. This was in fact Ben’s last needle, and his last thimble, and the last $5.00 he had to his name when he died.

And yet I’d also heard something else about Ben. One night while still in Russia, he hid in a barn during a thunderstorm, missing evening services and fearing that God would strike him dead during the night for his truancy. After waking alive and well the next morning he never went to shul again, having stared down the Almighty, whom he had shown wasn’t man enough to take him. Ben might have been self-effacing, but somehow he was also a badass. Perhaps there was a little chutzpah in the family even then.

During the years when I was raising money for the UJA, albeit always from the same one couple, I was learning—in my own way—about the self-loathing that so famously competes with chutzpah in many a Jewish psyche. Every summer, the counselors in my Jewish Community Centre summer camp led us kids in a rousing song that began:

Ai yi yi yikus
Nobody like us!
We are the kids from Centre Day Camp

A prideful few lines, in which we were meant to extol our own singularity. But what we little ones heard when our counselors taught us the words was something else: something barely different in sound, yet profoundly different in meaning. All summer long, what we sang was:

Ai yi yi yikus
Nobody likes us!
We are the kids from Centre Day Camp

The counselors never detected this slight alteration, but somehow it made sense to us campers. After all, we were the kids who, when invited over to our non-Jewish friends’ homes, were treated to white sugar cookies with delicious pink icing which then haunted our dreams for weeks, while all we offered in return were the brown kuffles or beige kamishbroit our mothers fashioned from old Pale of Settlement recipes. Sure, they were tasty in their own right. But they were no rosy-iced sugar cookie, and so they always elicited ridicule from our little gentile guests.

Why, then, wouldn’t we chirp, robustly and full-throatedly, “nobody likes us!”—as if we were simply acknowledging the most natural truth in the world?

When Krusty the Clown discovers, on the sixth episode of the Simpsons’ fifteenth season, that he wasn’t born Jewish, he remarks: “I thought I was a self-hating Jew; but it turns out I’m just a plain old antisemite.” The line between Jewish self-loathing and gentile anti-semitism is indeed a thin one: As noted by Sol Goldberg, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, the more someone resents having been born Jewish, the more he might identify with non-Jews, and the more he identifies with non-Jews, the more his aversion to Judaism, in his own mind, crosses the invisible border separating the self-loathing of the insider from the antisemitism of the outsider. But I once saw how permeable that border can be in a different way.

One day in my thirties, I found myself in the office of a faculty colleague at the University of Toronto. I was listening to him vent because the dean, who was Jewish, had hired a job candidate, also Jewish, instead of a non-Jewish applicant who was—according to my colleague —far more suitable.

“Why do you think that happened?,” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he replied; “it’s tribal.”

At the time, I assumed that he knew I was Jewish and—given his own Jewish-sounding surname—was speaking Jew to Jew in the usual self-critical way, as in “we’d better watch it, we’re grabbing too much.” But I had misunderstood him, for I later discovered that—despite his surname—he wasn’t Jewish. And I then realized that he had misunderstood me, since because of my surname—great-grandpa Ben had changed it from Starsky to Stark— he assumed I wasn’t Jewish either. He thought he was speaking casual antisemite to casual antisemite, as in “they’d better watch it, they’re grabbing too much.”

Certainly, others had misunderstood me before this. Lining up at a crowded deli in Ottawa some years earlier, I ordered a small fruit salad and then—when the deli man, barely raising his busy head, yelled “Small fruit! Who’s the small fruit?”—I cried, “I am! I’m the small fruit!,” immediately feeling a dozen raised eyebrows and appraising eyes swivel my way. And certainly, I myself had misunderstood others before. In my early twenties, I overheard a woman I was going out with refer to a work colleague named Curtis as “Coytis” while talking to him on the phone. I thought that perhaps she was exaggerating her Queens accent—pearls are poyls—for comic effect. Only later did I discover that she was actually calling him by the nickname she’d given him, “Coitus.” Reader, she married him.

But the conversation with my colleague presented both kinds of misunderstanding: He misunderstood me on one plane while I simultaneously misunderstood him on an entirely different one. In fact we actually had had two entirely different conversations: one that partook of the offhand antisemitism that a couple of non-Jews might express, the other the ever-ready self-reproach that two Jews might indulge. The words, though, were exactly the same. 

Chutzpah and self-loathing have each scored much attention as Jewish character traits. But for me, growing up, they found a reverberating echo chamber in my Canadianness. On the one hand, we Canadians are famously bold: think of Mounties, lumberjacks, hockey players who will take your knees out, Canada Strong, or even Pierre Trudeau, the cool intellectual who believed in “reason over passion” but was a black belt in judo. On the other hand, though, Canadians—as Mordecai Richler once put it—are a “reticent people, nicely self-deprecating,” always ready to cede, politely, to the will and claims of others. We Canadians, Robertson Davies once declared, have a “self-doubting soul.”

I had become aware, early in life, of both these aspects of the Canadian character, the intrepid heartiness that parallels Jewish chutzpah and the self-deprecation that matches Jewish self-loathing. On my first day of high school, while the girls were introduced to “home economics,” the boys toured all of the shops that were to comprise their industrial education. Mr. Gill the metalwork teacher, whom we visited first, informed us that if we misbehaved, we’d face a choice: Either go the principal’s office where we would get the strap—in which case our misdeed would be recorded on the books—or, Mr. Gill said as he smacked his hand with a metal pipe, “you can let me take care of it here” and no one will be the wiser.

We then went round to the woodworking shop where the teacher, Mr. Derkson, said something similar: The strap or—here he brandished a large wooden paddle—we could settle it within these four walls and the school would never need to know. Mr. Eliot, the drafting teacher, likewise: The officially-documented strap or—Mr. Eliot then gestured toward a T-square—just between us. In a school where even the teachers were apparently outlaws, my boyhood friends and I—steeped in the rough-and-tumble Canadian spirit—took this all in stride, though I admit that our apprehensiveness did ratchet up a notch as we approached the fourth and final stop on our tour, the shop of Mr. Wrinch the electricity teacher.

As young Canadians, even as we were being prepared to go mano a mano with our superiors, we were also receiving the conflicting message that our place on the world was a sometimes cringingly subordinate one. In 1955, a Toronto folk band called “the Travellers” penned the Canadian version of “This Land is Your Land”, writing only a new opening verse and tacking it on to most of the rest of Woody Guthrie’s America-focused lyrics. We seven year-olds thus found ourselves belting out, full-throatedly and robustly, our love of such wonders as our nation’s “diamond deserts,” of which there are of course precisely none. When we sang “This Land,” it was another country’s geography that was passing before our eyes. We were engaging in a collective bout of noisy self-effacement.

The dauntless daring of hockey players, lumberjacks, and Mounties might seem natural to Canada’s cold, forested, and rugged environment. But whence comes the self-deprecation? As some have observed, perhaps it’s in self-deprecation, more than anything else, that we Canadians have actually found a way of distinguishing ourselves from Americans, with their perceived national character trait of boastful self-assertion. I once met the US political sage David Gergen, who knew every president from Nixon to Trump. Only one of them, Gergen told me during a chat at a Toronto gathering, would he describe as a normal human being; the rest were governed by abnormally excessive egos or narcissism. The exception was Gerald Ford, who never sought the office. Otherwise, Gergen said, you had to be beyond-intoxicated on your own wondrousness to think you could do the job. By contrast, as Richler has observed, "[t]he Canadian kid who want[s] to be a prime minister isn't thinking big, he [is] setting a limit to his ambitions rather early."

The political commentator Scott Reid once inadvertently coined a Yogi Berra-ism that for me perfectly captures our natural tendency to yield, go slow, hesitate, not impose ourselves. On a talk show, explaining how the country should handle a contentious issue, Reid advised that “we have to take steps not to get ahead of ourselves.” That’s us tentative, cautious Canadians. We’re always taking steps not to get ahead of ourselves.

Canadian self-deprecation and Jewish self-loathing, I came to realize early on, relate as yin and yang. We Canadians don’t think that there’s anything particularly wrong with our national characteristics or qualities—we’re happy with our earnestness, energy, and brio—it’s just that we tend to be allergic to any show of pride or confidence based on those qualities, deeming all preening or swagger to be in bad taste, and so maintain a trait of ruthless self-deprecation.

The Jewish people, by contrast, have no traditionally discerned problem with pride or confidence—as the Bible says, we are a stiff-necked community—but we can be relentlessly critical and ironic about our own personality traits, especially our “nonathletic [and] neurotic” side, as the New York Times journalist Jessica Grose puts it, and so exhibit a propensity for unsparing self-loathing. And yet precisely because Canadian self-deprecation and Jewish self-loathing form such perfect complements, they risk, for the young Jewish Canadian growing up, becoming a complete trap. Both one’s personal qualities and taking pride in them are put in constant question. Between the self-loathing and the self-deprecation, it’s sometimes a wonder that we get up in the morning.

But because Canadians—though they might dislike pride—do like their own traits, and  because Jews—however critical they might be of their own traits—generally have no problem with pride, there’s room too for Canadian robustness and Jewish chutzpah to bloom. By my late teens I was aware of these parallel warring tugs within each of the two cultures that shaped me, encouraging me toward bravado on this occasion and bashfulness on that, pulling me between impertinence and diffidence: a presumptuous grabbing to get what I wanted and a mollifying tendency to assume that the claims of others were always superior to my own. I also had absolutely no idea how to reconcile the signals I was getting, no ability to imagine myself as anything but incoherent.

In the fall of 1979, after four undergraduate years at UBC, I began the Ph.D. program in political science at Harvard. During orientation week, my fellow graduate students and I gathered for a presentation by the Department’s political-philosophy professors to learn about their work. Into the lobby beforehand strode a woman who greeted each of us with such electric ebullience that I almost had to look away when my turn came.

She was Judith Shklar, one of the most important liberal political theorists of the 20th century, and she took her seat next to a dapper man at the head of the table: Harvey Mansfield, an equally prominent conservative. Mrs. Shklar—she did not, so I had been told, like to be called “Professor Shklar,” although she would accept “Dr. Shklar”—then spent much of the afternoon contradicting Mansfield, smacking him playfully on the shoulder while taunting “Fight back, Harvey! Fight back!”

This, I was soon to learn, was nothing for Mrs. Shklar, who had sometimes gone after intellectual opponents in seminars with such devastating force that she permanently altered academic reputations, leaving onlookers squirming with discomfort. She had, it was said, once argued Hannah Arendt to a standoff, the two brilliant women debating whether spitting on a political opponent qualifies as a legitimate form of speech because it’s an oral act, or fails to qualify because it’s not a verbal one. Apparently, this was an issue raised when a Roman senator named Lentulus spat on Cato the Younger, prompting Cato to retort: “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth.”

Of course, Mrs. Shklar was not the only Harvard professor who showed a certain intellectual bellicosity. I once witnessed Samuel Huntington, author of a number of famous political-science texts, quip to a job candidate during his presentation, “I find your thesis unexceptionable but also unexceptional.” You could hear the air slowly leaking out of the poor guy.

There was also the time when a student suggested to law professor Duncan Kennedy, in class, that a Marxist approach would have been more illuminating than Kennedy’s own. The student went on for a couple of minutes about the virtues of a Marxist theory of such and such, and a Marxist take on thus and so, while Kennedy peered at him with a look of growing incomprehension. And then all of a sudden, smacking his forehand as if he had suddenly understood, Kennedy pointed at the student and exclaimed “Oh—You mean Karl Marx!”

But it was all weak tea compared to Mrs. Shklar. She was the most thrillingly intimidating person I had ever met. A Jewish refugee from pre-War Europe, Mrs. Shklar had developed a joy in intellectual combat on behalf of her understanding of liberalism—which makes the prohibition of violence by the state against its citizens the supreme political value—and it was marvelous and terrible to behold her in full battle mode. After that first encounter I resolved to sit in on her courses without formally registering in them, thereby sparing myself from being graded—judged —by her, an experience I wasn’t sure I was psychologically ready for. Trying to engage with her as much as I could, while protecting myself from any institutional consequences of the vast deficiencies in my knowledge that I felt in her presence: that was about as much chutzpah as my self-critical diffidence would allow me.

One morning in early 1982 I was walking across Harvard Yard when I ran into Mrs. Shklar, who asked me where I was going. I was on my way, I told her, to meet with Raymond Vernon, a political economy professor, to discuss my writing a dissertation under his supervision. “No you’re not,” she replied. “You’re going to write it for me. Come to my office at 2:00.”

At 2:00 I knocked on Mrs. Shklar’s office door and—it being slightly ajar—walked in. She had placed her desk so that she faced toward the window and away from the room’s entrance. Turning to look fixedly at me, she remained quiet for a moment and then said: “Fritzi Hayek thinks it’s alright if old people die of rickets.”

This news struck me like a thunderbolt. It wasn’t that, in the view of the great free-market economist Friedrich Hayek, we should all try to fend for ourselves without state support. I knew that. Nor was I nonplussed about not having received any kind of traditional “hello, glad you’re here.” Rather, what silenced me for a few seconds was the fact that someone as fierce and Teutonic as Hayek could have abided a nickname like Fritzi, a piece of information that made me want to laugh out loud. But even before I could collect myself, Mrs. Shklar—aware that I was deeply interested in the issues of snobbery and hypocrisy about which she was then writing— began telling me what my dissertation would be about.

“Your thesis will be called `Images of Bourgeois Man,’” she began. “The first chapter will be on the Bourgeois as Parvenu. You’ll talk about Dickens, Thackeray, possibly Fitzgerald and others who wrote about social climbing. The next chapter will be on the Bourgeois as Philistine: Matthew Arnold. Then the Bourgeois as Bad Citizen, Rousseau and Tocqueville, and then the Bourgeois as Exploiter: Lassalle and Engels. And finally, the Bourgeois as Pariah, in which you will focus on the Jewish man of business in the 19th century.” Here, she explained, I would explore how the gentile bourgeoisie, in a straightforward Freudian way, had always projected traits that it hated in itself, such as materialism, greed, and sharp dealing, on the Jew, thus making him a despised figure: a self-hatred converted into other-hatred.

My thesis, as Mrs. Shklar outlined it, sounded wonderful to me. I was intensely eager to read it, although unfortunately not so much to write it. Mrs. Shklar then gave me a piece of advice: “Go away and work on this dissertation. We’ll see each other from time to time, but don’t talk to me about what you’re writing or send me any of it before it’s entirely done. If you do, you run the risk that I’ll take over the project and tell you what to say.” Shrewdly gauging my high self-doubt-to-self-assertion ratio, at least when it came to her, she knew that I was unlikely to deviate from any intellectual direction she might give me, or to stand up to her in any way.

I naturally did what she said—which was, basically, to put myself in a position where I wouldn’t feel compelled to do what she said. I finished my thesis three years later without ever talking to her about it, but there was one minor hiccup. The first chapter—the Bourgeois as Parvenu—ballooned to become the entire dissertation. I never got around to writing any of the other chapters, and I never even did any reading for what was to have been the final chapter, the one on the Jew: the Bourgeois as Pariah. Some years later, though, Mrs. Shklar and I did return to the subject of that never-to-be-written essay, and the focus on chutzpah and self-loathing that she had imagined for it.

Why did it take me three years to write my dissertation? During my graduate-student years I was also doing some journalism. In the summer of 1982 I attended the 25th anniversary celebration for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, held at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder. I was there to write a piece about the proceedings for The New Criterion, a magazine that had just been founded by Hilton Kramer, previously the arch-modernist art critic for the New York Times. The Kerouac conference—whose speakers included Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs—was hosted by Allen Ginsberg who (I soon discovered) intensely disliked Kramer. But while Kramer and Ginsberg might have been nemeses, I learned in Boulder that chutzpah and self-loathing are not. In fact, the more you have of one, the more you might well have of the other as well.

At a party for the press on the conference’s first evening, I was standing near a jukebox, eavesdropping on Abbie Hoffman proposing a ménage à trois to a couple of women, when Ginsberg sought me out. He blasted the New Criterion for being a “neo-Reaganist rag” and we exchanged a few words, which I don’t remember, although I do recall clumsily spilling my drink on my shirt. Feeling the need to exit, I summoned up all my chutzpah and gave him what I thought was an unbeatable parting shot. “It’s easy to be acclaimed a great poet,” I said to him, “when you’ve taken care of the problem of rhyme by ensuring that every other word you use is either `bong’ or `dong.’”

What I discovered from this episode is that chutzpah and self-loathing, far from being squabbling siblings, are like parent and child. It’s not just that self-loathing can give birth to chutzpah, as when—so scholars have noted—some among our number, riddled with self-loathing directed at their own immigrant Jewish upbringing, muster the chutzpah necessary to break into gentile society. It’s that chutzpah can give birth to self-loathing. I had certainly shown a kind of combative chutzpah in talking to a famous poet the way I did, but afterward I hated myself for being so snotty. A few days after I returned home, a poem arrived in the mail, composed by Ginsberg and memorializing our encounter. It was written in my voice, as if I were confessing that the real reason that I had come to Boulder was that I was in love with him. He referenced my having spilled my drink. Bongs and dongs were mentioned too.

Having done little in those years to reconcile my dual Jewish-Canadian heritages of chutzpah versus self-loathing, and assertiveness versus self-deprecation, I got my doctorate in June of 1985. In the same month I took a job in Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s office, where I became the assistant to Dalton Camp, Mulroney’s senior advisor. Camp, who was then in his late sixties, had once been president of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party, and then had flourished as a formidable political strategist and commentator. I can’t say why I was of interest to him, but he certainly won me over in our first interview. At one point Camp mentioned Joe Clark, who had briefly interrupted Pierre Trudeau’s fifteen-year tenure as prime minister by defeating Trudeau in May of 1980 and then losing to him in February of 1981. “Joe Clark’s time in office was so short,” Camp ventured, that when “Trudeau crossed back over the aisle in Parliament to sit once again in the prime minister’s chair, he found that his seat was still cold.”

I admired Mulroney, who had accomplished much, persuading Ronald Reagan to sign an Acid Rain treaty with Canada and leading the Commonwealth’s opposition to apartheid. After coming to office in 1984, though, he had quickly become unpopular with the voters, acquiring the nickname “Lyin’ Brian”. As far as I could see this was unfair; he had uttered no lies, at least to the public, only the usual evasions and puffery that go with the trade. I thus spent some time reading all his statements as prime minister to see if I could detect any verbal tics that might be putting people off. Two of his mannerisms, it turned out, were the Canadian tendencies toward gladiatorial self-assertion on the one hand and placatory appeasement on the other—to try to take ground but then yield it back—all within the space of a few seconds, as in: 

Lookit. Nobody in his right mind would ever accuse the CBC of being a bastion of Conservative support…the CBC has established traditions of objectivity and fairness on the journalistic side which rank among the honourable ones in Canadian journalism.

Or:

I don’t respond to criticism from the Toronto Star because it is so silly and baseless as to not warrant a serious response…. I [say that] not with…any malice…The Toronto Star enunciates [its] view very capably.

Or:

Every guy and his brother stands up and asks you false and inflammatory and derogatory questions…There is nothing wrong with that….

As Canadian as they are, the twin desires to be both pugnaciously pugilistic and politely propitiating within the same breath were not helpful to Mulroney. Their chief victim, when they operated in close proximity, was his perceived sincerity.

I was a junior staffer, but I once did have a person-to-person meeting with Mulroney. I had written a memo—as with all such memos, it was on Prime Minister’s Office stationery—on a foreign-policy issue, and it made its way to his desk, to which I was summoned.

“When I left Ogilvy Renault after eight years of working there,” Mulroney began—he was referring to his former Montreal law firm—“the movers came to pick up my papers, but they couldn’t find them. Do you know why?”

“No, sir,” I said, “why did the movers not find your papers?”

“It was because in all my time at Ogilvy Renault,” Mulroney replied—holding me with a laser stare to bore what he was about to say into my skull—“I never wrote anything down.” Translation: He didn’t need the headache of having of a junior aide’s free-lance musings on a sensitive foreign-policy matter, written on Prime Minister’s Office letterhead, come to the attention of the press. I signified that I understood.

Then he turned to the substance of what I had written, which discussed ways of deepening Canada’s participation in UN peacekeeping missions around the world. He was proud, he told me, that in 1956 Lester Pearson, then Canadian foreign minister, had played a global leadership role in initiating UN peacekeeping during the Suez crisis. Pearson had sold the idea to Canadians by appealing explicitly to what he called our national qualities of “modesty” and “timidity”—Pearson knew that Canadians would always prefer to promote peace internationally in concert with others, not unilaterally—but UN peacekeeping also reached our bold and daring side. “Can you believe the innovation Canada sparked?,” Mulroney said as he concluded our discussion: “gearing up soldiers, giving them weapons, preparing them for combat, yet they’re there to make peace, not war.” We Canadians are rugged and daring not to advance our own claims, he marveled, but in the cause of mediation and moderation. I thought little more of Mulroney’s observation—until something else happened.

What happened is that not long after, I attended a talk in Ottawa by Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then Israel’s ambassador to the UN. In his remarks Netanyahu said something striking, something that he would never say today. “Israel, in the conduct of war, has always been held to a double standard,” he declared, “and I want to be very clear about this”—here he paused to prepare his audience for the counter-intuitive point he was about to make—“Israel expects, insists, and in fact demands that it be held to a double standard.” By that he meant that Israel will always conduct itself, in war, on a moral plane above those of its enemies. There are things Israel will not do even though its adversaries might; instead the Jewish people will always hold to the highest norms that the community of nations espouses.

What Netanyahu said then was something that Israeli leaders had long expressed. In 1936, David Ben-Gurion remarked that others “measure us by a different standard…our strength is in the purity of our aspirations and the justice of our deeds.” After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Golda Meir avowed that while she could forgive Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for making his boys kill Israeli boys, she couldn’t forgive him for making Israeli boys kill Egyptian boys. In 1984, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek was asked by a member of the Israeli public, “why do you want us to behave better than others?,” and he responded: “I want us to live by our standards, not others.” Even as late as 2014, Netanyahu’s right-hand man Ron Dermer—then Israeli ambassador to the US—stated that the Israel Defense Forces “should be given the Nobel Peace Prize … for fighting with unimaginable restraint” during that year’s Gaza conflict.

As I said, this is a sentiment that Netanyahu wouldn’t—and couldn’t—express today, after the recent conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. But it’s still alive as an aspiration for many Jews, especially those who are today critical of Israel’s conduct, and as I left Netanyahu’s talk, tumblers in my mind at long last clicked open. If a Jew is someone who ideally —as Dermer was later to say—wins a peace prize for fighting a war, then a Canadian is someone who gets kitted out for war in order to fight for peace. It’s those mirror-image characteristics that being Jewish and being Canadian can each help bring out in the other, by force of mutual gravitation, when they are combined in a Jewish Canadian: A Jewish Canadian is someone who, in fighting a war, would aim to be the most earnest of peacemakers, and in the cause of peace, the fiercest of warriors. That’s what Jewish-Canadian-ness, at its best, represents.

Or, in a less geopolitical and more personal vein, this is how chutzpah and self-loathing, assertiveness and self-deprecation, might work out their contradictions in the Jewish-Canadian soul. A Jewish Canadian is someone who, even when deploying brazen nerve, would still properly defer to the legitimate opposing claims of others. And even in the midst of accommodating the opposing needs of others, a Jewish Canadian would do so with confidence and moxie.

That’s the seam at which being Jewish and being Canadian meet. It’s how their heritage of warring traits can coalesce. That’s how they finally all jelled, at least for me.

By working in Mulroney’s office, I eventually learned that partisan politics was not my natural habitat. Self-critical as I continued to be, I always questioned and doubted my own side and tended to see value in the contrary perspective. And so in 1990 I headed back toward academic life, ultimately becoming a professor at the University of Toronto. If anyone asks, I now say that I am above politics—but also, I can never resist adding, beneath contempt. Self-deprecation dies hard.

In the spring of 1992, during a fellowship year at Harvard, I spent an afternoon with Judith Shklar. We had arranged to meet at her office and then walk to the Faculty Club for lunch. As always, her door was slightly ajar, so after knocking I entered. “When Robert Coles starts a seminar,” she began as she turned to look at me, “he rips open his chest, tears out his heart, places it on the table, and says to everyone `Look at that! Isn’t it beautiful?’” I had to admit that this was a recognizable, if sharp, portrait of Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist. I’d attended his seminars in the past, and Mrs. Shklar had obviously just been thinking about him.

With her customary greeting out of the way, Mrs. Shklar and I headed to the Faculty Club. We discussed Jesse Jackson, for whom she had voted in the 1988 Democratic primary, but eventually our conversation made its way to something that Mrs. Shklar and I had never talked about: the unwritten part of my dissertation on the “Jew: the bourgeois as pariah.” She told me at length what I would have said in that chapter, and how among other things it would have discussed intermarriage. Many an ambitious young bourgeois Jew—whether in the 19th century or much more recently—deserts the dusky, brown-eyed Leahs and Rebeccas he meets in the Jewish ghetto, Mrs. Shklar noted, to pursue the blond, rosy-cheeked Marys and Catherines of the Christian manor. Why? A combination, she said, of intrepid presumptuousness, a not-to-be-denied desire to enter into forbidden territory—in other words, chutzpah—and self-loathing, a desperate wish to leave his very identity behind and assimilate: become a gentile.

After we said our goodbyes, I pondered the psychological brew of self-assertiveness and self-abnegation that Mrs. Shklar had described, and that I had noodled over for almost my entire life. But somehow I could no longer get into it. It had resolved itself for me and had begun slipping away. In fact, when I thought about her description of Jewish boys deserting the dark and brown-eyed Jewish girls of their youth—and hankering for the mysterious golden-haired and rosy-hued maidens that gentile parents raised—something entirely different flashed through my mind: the thought of Jewish boys deserting the brown and raisined confections of their youth and clamoring for the elusive rosy-iced and golden-caked delicacies that the gentile mothers served. Not every one of the Jewish boy’s psychological struggles originates in his agon between self-loathing and chutzpah. Sometimes it might have to do with nothing more complex than his early experiences with baked goods.

I walked back to my apartment on Fernald Drive, to my wife and daughters. Four months later Mrs. Shklar, that fierce and happy warrior on behalf of a peaceful liberal order, died of a sudden heart attack. It was the last time I saw her.

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Andrew Stark is a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Consolations of Mortality (Yale University Press, 2016), and his work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other publications.

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