Israel Is a Case Study in the Need for Humility in the Social Sciences

Two points stand out in Ofir Haivry’s Mosaic essay, “Israel’s Demographic Miracle.”

The first touches on Israel’s inspiring and in some ways inexplicable demographic strength. The Jewish fertility rate is trending upward, Haivry points out, for deep-seated reasons of culture: a widespread ethic that values and validates child-rearing, an ethos of collective solidarity, and the still-powerful echoes of religious ideals even among the most secular of Israelis.

These are formidable, if amorphous, foundations for a country’s demographic potency. And they follow the general pattern: all of Israel’s deepest strengths—its democracy, its military prowess, its culture of camaraderie and self-sacrifice—are relatively poorly understood by sociologists and political scientists, rooted as they are more in unconscious social psychology than in any explicit planning or policy actions by Israel’s founders or leaders.