Jared Kushner, first son-in-law and White House senior adviser, used a personal email account to communicate about government business, it was recently revealed. In his initial application for a security clearance, Mr. Kushner failed to list a single meeting with a foreign government official during the campaign and transition. (Amended forms now reportedly list over a hundred contacts.) He is also, according to official sources, a person of interest in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, although when he was recently hauled up to Capitol Hill to testify about a meeting he attended at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who was promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, he insisted he was entirely blameless.

Lots of explanations have been put forward as to why Mr. Kushner seems to operate as though the rules don’t apply to him. Perhaps there’s one more factor to consider: his New Jersey upbringing.

Anyone who has ever driven on the New Jersey Turnpike knows that, at a certain point in the road, the entire Manhattan skyline appears to rise from the surrounding marshland like a close-yet-so-far Land of Oz, both tempting and terrorizing with its mysterious jutting cutouts. To traverse this roadway, as Mr. Kushner surely did as a young man, was undoubtedly to exist in a constant state of aspiration and alienation. No matter one’s personal glories, for those who call New Jersey home, and especially those who reside in Northern New Jersey, it’s difficult to forget that one is still not from “the city,” as the landmass across the river is known. Overcompensation tends to follow. Blind arrogance is an occasional byproduct.

I know because I remember experiencing such feelings myself while growing up in Bergen County in the 1970s and ’80s. While Mr. Kushner was raised in Livingston, an upper-middle-class town of 30,000 in neighboring Essex County, he attended school in Paramus, a middle-class town a dozen miles from the edge of Manhattan that, with its surfeit of malls, has long held the status of a punch line. How an intelligent young man could have spent his formative years in such a place — never mind at an Orthodox yeshiva — and not come away feeling humbled in some way remains something of a mystery.