I.

A lot of people are very surprised to learn that Judaism is such an important part of my life, despite not believing one iota of the Jewish religion or having any meaningful adherence to it. This essay is my attempt to explain my feelings.

Growing up, I didn’t feel particularly connected to Judaism. I was raised in an insular Jewish community where nearly all my friends were Jewish. We distinguished ourselves by poking fun at the kids who were “too Jewish”—those who went to Jewish schools or lived in Jewish suburbs. We prided ourselves on being the Jews who were theoretically open to hanging out with non-Jews, unlike the more conservative ones we saw as prudes who never had any interest in exploring the world beyond their community.

But as I grew older, I began to notice some… oddities.

II.

In high school, I was obsessed with a band called Phish. I skipped school, borrowed my parents’ car, and drove with my best friends to the United States to follow them around. In my community, Phish wasn’t just any band – they were *the* band. Everyone knew them, everyone loved them.

It wasn’t until later that I realized something strange: despite their reverence in the Jewish community, most people outside of it, especially in Canada, had never heard of Phish. While two of the four members of Phish are Jewish, their audience is about 25% Jewish – a massive overrepresentation.

This pattern kept repeating. When I studied philosophy of physics in university, I one day had the realization that nearly every physicist I had spent time obsessing over was Jewish. When I got into behavioural economics, literally every economist whose works I intensely devoured was Jewish.

Then I discovered Effective Altruism, inspired by figures like Peter Singer, Holden Karnofsky, and Elie Hassenfeld, and later, the rationalist community with writers like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Again, I found myself gravitating toward communities where nearly everyone was Jewish.

In 2010, I took my first big overseas trip across Europe. Having never really left my insular bubble, I assumed that as a Canadian, I’d hit it off with other Canadians abroad. What I discovered, which I never could have expected, was that when I met Jews from all over the world – including countries very different from Canada – I almost always felt an immediate, strong connection. With other Canadians abroad, there was close to nothing.

It’s not just that my favourite novels are all Yiddish literature or my favourite TV shows are Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Nathan For You (all Jewish), it’s that whenever I find something new that deeply resonates with me, nearly 100% of the time, when I Wikipedia the creator, I’ll find out it was produced by a fellow Jew.

III.

At this point, you might be thinking: “Okay, so you’re into some niche interests that happen to be popular among Jews. So what?”

But here’s the thing: these are all pretty niche or “weird” interests, and most of them were not products of my upbringing, but things I found on my own through different stages of my life. The fact that all of them, literally 100%, are oriented around this Jewish connection, makes me feel there is something deeper at play here.

It’s as if there’s some hidden variable, some underlying factor that predisposes me and other Jews to a particular set of interests and ways of thinking. 

IV.

There’s a line that used to run through Eastern Europe. It’s not visible on any map, but it’s as real to Jews as any national border. On one side, people eat their gefilte fish unsweetened. On the other, they add sugar. This is the Gefilte Fish Line, and it divides two groups of Jews: the Litvaks and the Galicianers.

The Litvaks, north of the line, are described as:

“The stereotypical Litvak is portrayed as unemotional, withdrawn, intellectual, and mercilessly critical. He challenges authority, is skeptical by nature, stubborn, and impatient with others. The Litvak’s commitment to tradition is suspect; his Judaism is purely intellectual. Even when studying Torah, the Litvak is said to have one leg out the door, on his way to inevitable apostasy. He studies Mishnah, Talmud, and halakhic codes publicly, while secretly glancing at Christian scripture or reading Marx and Tolstoy.”

The Galicianers, south of the line, are more spiritual and joyous. They’re the ones who, in modern Israel, drive around blasting music from speakers in traffic, trying to get people to dance and brighten their mood when stopped at red lights.

Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Borat’s cousin) has a theory about autism. He calls it the “extreme male brain” hypothesis, and suggests that autistic traits are just an exaggeration of typically “male” cognitive styles. I have what I refer to as “extreme Jewish brain”, where I have exaggeration of cognitive styles typically found in Jews.

If you look at this blog’s current mission statement, which tells the story of how, through creative thinking, a Jew came up with an ‘argument’ that saved thousands of lives during the Holocaust, it also references a Jewish concept, portraying something called yiddishe kop (danfrank.ca/about)—a penchant for a particular type of creative problem-solving.

If I had to summarize my core traits, the ones that make me more alone in the world and less compatible with most people, I’d say:

1. I am extremely analytical and insatiably curious, with a desire to understand everything in the world. (Litvak)
2. I am imbued with passion and a desire to experience as much of the good things in life as possible. (Galicianer)

You will likely not be surprised to learn that my ancestry straddles both sides of the Gefilte Fish Line, and I am both a Litvak and a Galicianer.

In finance, there’s a concept called a levered portfolio. Instead of having, say, 60% equities and 40% bonds for 100% of your funds, you can borrow money and instead have 165% equities and 135% bonds. This allows you to amplify your exposure to both asset classes beyond what would normally be possible.

That’s how I feel about my Jewish identity. I’m not just a mix of Litvak and Galicianer traits – I’m a levered portfolio of extreme levels of Jewish characteristics. I’m 165% analytical Litvak and 135% passionate Galicianer. While I’m not sure where I’m getting this leverage from, aside from perhaps my Jewish ancestry, it feels like an apt description of how I feel as a person.

V.

But why are Jews like this?

My theory of the story of Judaism is that there was a community of people in the land of Israel who were unique—people who were deeply curious, passionate, and most of all, loved learning — people who just wanted to write and comment on verbose long essays (aka – big nerds). Knowing the rest of the world didn’t care for this life, they wanted to ensure their community of like-minded individuals would continue. Instead of building a pyramid or a large empire like the Egyptians and Babylonians, who failed to last, they created a narrative of shared suffering instead, embodied in the story of Exodus (which we know didn’t actually happen), to be retold each year, to bind this community together in perpetuity. They built an entire civilization designed to select for and nurture these traits.

There’s a famous story about the Ponevezher Rav, one of the leading Litvak Rabbis of modern times (and, incidentally, the uncle of Danny Kahneman). After the Holocaust, he visited Rome and shouted:

“Titus! Evil Titus! Take a good look at what has occurred. You dragged my hapless people out of our land two millennia ago and led them into an exile from which they were never to return. You went home to Rome – the most powerful nation on earth – in glory and triumph. But Titus, where are you? What has become of the glory that was Rome? Titus, *Mir Zenen noch do, Avu Bist Du?* (We are still here! Where are you?)”

To our credit, despite some hiccups along the way, no other group has endured with the same continuous and cohesive identity as the Jewish people since the time the Torah was written.

VII.

So where does this leave me? As a proud, nerdy Jew, I believe I am a direct product of this community, which intentionally built an entire civilization for me to belong to – a world fit for people like me.

I remember when I first heard of the journalist Daniel Pearl’s last words (before he was beheaded by the mastermind behind 9/11), now memorialized in epitaphs in Jewish cemeteries across the world: “My Father is Jewish, my Mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”

While I don’t know if this will be literally what’s on my tombstone, as it is for many other Jews, it might as well be, because I view the entirety of my being and identity consumed in this sentence. There is nothing else I view to be significant about me that isn’t captured by being Jewish.

In the end, maybe that’s what my “extreme Jewish brain” really is – not just a set of traits or interests, but a profound sense of connection to a millennia-old tradition of learning, analysis, and passion. A tradition that has somehow managed to produce both the austere Litvaks and the joyous Galicianers, the physicists and the Phish fans, the behavioural economists and the effective altruists.

And me, somewhere in the middle of it all, a levered portfolio of Jewish traits, hovering on both sides of the Gefilte Fish Line.