It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.
“My job at Stanford is rather different from the ones I had held previously in that my own ambitions must take a back seat to the well-being of the students with whom I work.”
“Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality.”