A significant number of non-Jewish people in the United States are familiar with one or another version of this quotation from Leo Rosten's popular book, The Joys of Yiddish (1968):
Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
A chutzpanik may be defined as the man who shouts, "Help! Help!" while beating you up.
Lilian Feinsilver, "The Yiddish Is Showing" in Perspectives on American English (1980) has this entry for chutzpa (and related spellings):
chutzpa, chutzpah, chutspa, chutspeh, chuzpa, hutzpa, etc.
This Yiddish term for nerviness [cross reference omitted] has been heard on TV and seen in much current journalistic writing. It is listed in several dictionaries, including the Funk and Wagnalls' Standard College Dictionary, which in 1967 and 1968 advertised itself in the New York Times as "the only college dictionary with "chutzpah".'
As an objective measure of the breadth of adoption of the word amongst the goyim of the United States, consider that chutzpah appears (without definition) in six separate issues of Texas Monthly magazine between November 1976 and July 1980 despite a readership that tends not to have a deep vocabulary of Yiddish terms.
The popularity of chutzpah among English speakers who knew few other Yiddish words may have arisen at a fairly early date. From Benzion Mosinsohn, "Palestine and Hebrew in Zionism," in The Maccabæan: A Magazine of Jewish Life and Letters (October 1917):
[A]nother prominent English Zionist said bitterly, "Those Russian Jews! I do not understand them. It is Chutzpah [probably the only Hebrew word in the gentleman's vocabulary]. They are given a land. What right have they to choose?" That was the clearest exposition of the philanthropic attitude. Philanthropy knows only the present.