New Challenges, and New Opportunities, for the Guardian of the Jewish Nation

I thank my respondents Sarah Rindner, Haviv Rettig Gur, and Alon Tal for their comments on “Israel’s Demographic Miracle.” All three essentially agree with my presentation of the facts concerning the unexpected turnaround in Israel’s Jewish birthrates from a downward slope twenty years ago to what is by now a sustained rise in fertility. They also agree that Israel thereby presents a stark contrast to the picture in other developed societies, where the fertility rate has been steadily sinking to or below replacement level.

Nor do the respondents contest my discussion of the cultural and social factors that may help explain this unique phenomenon. Where they differ among themselves, and in some cases with me, is in their respective assessments of the implications of this phenomenon—a subject I touched on only lightly but now, thanks to their contributions, can address more fully.

To Sarah Rindner, the success of the Israeli model—a contemporary society whose members, she writes, “remain educationally advanced and psychologically stable while actually exceeding the fertility replacement rate”—should lead to “a reconsideration of some settled assumptions about childrearing in the modern world.” For, as she enumerates, despite the ostentatiously favorable attitude toward children common in Western democratic culture, despite the abundant presence of how-to manuals dealing with every aspect of parenting, and despite the arguments being made to persuade people, by appeals to their own “enlightened self-interest,” to have more children, there still seems to be no stopping the reality of falling birthrates across most developed societies.