#MakeJewishBabies and Israel’s Demographic Exceptionalism
Why Israel's fertility rate vastly exceeds that of any other nation with a similar level of affluence and education
[Note: This essay is too long to appear fully in certain e-mail providers. If you got this by e-mail, please click on the title to read the entire post on Substack. -NH]
The NYT ran a darkly whimsical story in January about a 30something Jewish woman living in Brooklyn who joined the March for Israel on the DC National Mall to show her support for the Jewish state in its war against Hamas. On the front of her sign, she wrote, “Bring Them Home,” referring to the hostages. But on the back she wrote, “Who’s Coming Home With Me? #MakeJewishBabies.”
That’s the fetching lede for a discussion of reports that many Jews in the global diaspora are considering making more babies in response to their new sense of vulnerability after the October 7 Hamas attack.
Most diaspora Jews feel a strong affinity with Israel. In America, a third of practicing Jews have lived in Israel or visited Israel more than once; half have visited there at least once. Eight in ten say that caring about Israel is an important part of being Jewish. One third (including nearly all Orthodox Jews) agree that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” Eight in ten regard the statement “Israel has no right to exist” as antisemitic. What’s more, even before the October 7 attack, most of these diaspora Jews (three-quarters of U.S. Jews) believed that antisemitism in their country had been rising in recent years. Since the attack, this perception has risen further, with two-thirds feeling “less secure than a year ago”—on social media, at work, on campus, and in public places (especially in European cities, the staging ground for massive pro-Hamas rallies).
In response to perceived threats, behavior is changing. According to a recent American Jewish Committee survey, nearly half of U.S. Jews report changing their daily habits, such as “not wearing something that would identify them as Jewish or avoiding certain places.” Other diaspora Jews are taking more active measures. Many are buying guns and getting firearms training—following the lead of large numbers of Israeli civilians after October 7. Others are deciding to migrate to Israel, especially (according to some reports) those living in diaspora countries that report the sharpest rise in antisemitic incidents.
But having more children? During the early postwar era, many Orthodox Jews recommended that families have an extra “Holocaust child,” one more than they were otherwise planning. We don’t have much quantitative proof that this happened back then. Similarly, the NYT story provides only anecdotal evidence that this is happening today.
We don’t need proof, though, to imagine why this response would make sense. Jews may be the only ethnic group to understand that, in historical time, they have been targeted for global extermination—and that, in recent decades, the survival of their homeland has come to depend upon prevailing demographically over their regional enemies. Repeatedly, Israel has been compelled to fight major wars against these enemies. And repeatedly, Israelis have found that they had to overcome not only the enemies’ overwhelming numerical superiority, but also the widespread perception, even among allies, that this superiority rendered their nation a hopeless cause. Just before the 1956 Suez Crisis, relates historian Martin Gilbert, President Eisenhower openly mused that there seemed to be little point in selling arms to 1.7M Jews since they couldn’t possibly prevail against 40M Arabs.
So yes, numbers matter. And so long as they do, births matter.