Trego's Mountain Ear

Twenty years ago, when demographers talked about Israel, the concept of Israel surviving as a Jewish nation was usually dismissed.  There’s a single unyielding number that tells us whether a society will continue – it takes a fertility rate of 2.07 for a society to survive, and Israel didn’t have it.  So when I looked it up again, I learned that the world had changed.  Fertility of Jewish and Other Women in Israel, by Level of Religiosity 1979–2020 yielded this information:  Jewish women are having kids at a level both above replacement, but also at a higher rate than  non-Jewish women in Israel.

I’m fond of the phrases “demography is destiny” and “the future belongs to those who are in it.”  In this case, sometime in this century, Israelis made the decision to have more kids.  For years, the nation grew by immigration – now the population is increasing due to that 3.10 fertility rate we see above.