I've seen a very similar thing happen at my little American church and a nearby church like it. People join because they like the community or the preaching or whatever, and then a few months later they look around and go, whoa, everybody else here has like 3 or 4 or 5 kids. Kids are everywhere, and they are just a normal thing. A few years go by, and pretty soon that couple that joined is now on baby number 2 or baby number 3 themselves.
I don’t think that is talked about enough. There is increasing large segmentation of the population by age, both in activities and housing. But people just primarily seem to analyze this in terms of race and affluence.
Your brutal honesty about religious demographics made me laugh…mostly because it’s true. I’ve never seen someone break it down to the Anglo world in such detail. Do you anticipate becoming a public speaker or building some YouTube channel?
There isn't a National Amishism, but there are Mennonites who could be compared to the Charedi-adjacent communities in this model. How do Anabaptists as a whole stack up?
In my experience at least with the more traditional Anabaptist churches, they're very close to Amish fertility levels. If the Amish are at 6-7, the rest of the Anabaptist groups probably average out at 4-5.
The difference is, they lose a lot more of their young people. So fertility is high among the ones who stay, but that doesn't account for the ones who leave.
The reason the Amish are growing so rapidly as a group is not only do they maintain high fertility, but they have a culture that provides very stong incentives to stay within the culture, and deliberately handicaps young people in ways that make it very difficult for them to thrive if they leave.
The more conservative and traditional the group, in other words the more of that handicapping they do, the higher their retention rate. The Amish do better than most other Anabaptist groups on that metric.
Great essay! You kind of rejected the nationalism explanation right away. But a variant that only applies to Israel and not other nationalistic cultures is that most regular, secular, Israeli jews still feel a strong obligation to have children because of the very real existential threat that's ever present. This obligation is probably emphasized both from the bottom up and the top down.
This is a fair question that I didn't deal with, so:
1) First of all, if we're saying it's nationalism + existential threat, then the first thing to check is whether each individual factor boosts fertility. We've covered nationalism, so do feelings of existential dread boost fertility? It doesn't seem to me either that this is the case, or it is likely that it is the case. If we want to pick combinations of individual factors that only apply to Israel then we can do this pretty much infinitely. For example, Israel is (a) by the beach (b) sixty percent desert and (c) begins with the letter 'I'. Other countries meet 1 or 2 of these criteria, but not all 3, so perhaps this is the true explanation? But obviously not, thus, unless each factor in the proposed combo boost fertility I don't think this is a productive way of theorising.
2) It seems to me that Eastern European countries, especially but not just Ukraine, also have this feeling of existential dread, namely that Russia will conquer them and abolish their nationhood. That may not be a very rational thing to believe in light of Russia's military capability, but it is a widespread belief and it doesn't seem to do anything for fertility. (You can also argue that, given their crummy TFR and massive emigration, Ukrainians are under a genuine existential threat.)
I suppose it's not the existential threat per de (whether or not it really is existential at all). But Israel really is very different than many other countries who share surface level similarities like Ukraine.
Maybe it's in part a result of Israeli jews/zionists having a very strong purpose and vision for their country when it was established, being relatively few in numbers at the beginning and everyone having an explicit and implicit understanding that their needs to be more Israelis/Jews in Israel for the country to thrive and survive. From the start the whole of Israel was more like an Amish community that settled in the Midwest than an already existing country.
I guess I running the risk of just adding more and more variables line you point out making any combination of unique variables part of explanation. But the above really seems like it's quite unique to Israel. The question is whether or not thst background is pertinent to its TFR 70-100 years later.
The two First World countries that, after Israel, most credibly could be said to face an existential threat are South Korea and Taiwan, and they are … not doing terribly well, fertility-wise.
All the biological pressure from returning GIs and unmarried women had to go somewhere. A high percentage of newly married couples started their families immediately.
My wife commented that seeing other women with newborns made her wistful. If we had been in our twenties instead of our forties we might have ended up with three or four children.
>My wife commented that seeing other women with newborns made her wistful. If we had been in our twenties instead of our forties we might have ended up with three or four children.
Countries that were neutral in World War 2, or were occupied early (such as Sweden, Spain and Denmark) all experienced baby booms. It was not driven by returning soldiers 'making up' for babies they would've had, had they not been deployed.
I think the synchronization had much to do with it. All those marriages, and pregnancies, and babies, all at once, inspired other women to start or enlarge their families. Even without the pill a woman in a normal marriage does have some influence over her fertility, especially in the positive direction.
9 languages die every year. That means an entire culture just disappears because people can't be bothered to keep it going. It doesn't seem that fear of cultural extinction is that big a motivator for people in general.
Bothered? A lot of those languages have less than a thousand speakers, living in desperate poverty on the margins of an expanding dominant culture. Cultural survival is a luxury in the face of actual survival.
Fair point (although some do), but most live in pretty deep poverty from which the only viable escape involves assimilating to the dominant culture.
The question of minority language survival is complicated though - even the Welsh and Irish struggle with it - all I meant was that “can’t be “bothered” seems unnecessarily ungenerous
Your larger post is persuasive, but this comment is a little callous.
Of course the European Jews were subjected to near death (literal extinction) in the Shoah but they still had numbers far exceeding most of those tiny indigenous cultures, not to mention enormous cultural and linguistic resources to pull themselves back to cultural flourishing.
I'm responding to the claim that "the high TFR among the ethnic German minority in the Alto Adige". I don't believe this because in most cases where there is a small minority like this they just give up and assimilate. It seems these arguments are made by looking at a tiny minority of the relevant sample group and then making inferences that fit only with that small sample.
I think this is correct. Evangelical christians tend to marry and have kids at a young age. they are somewhat isolated from the mainstream culture but not isolated like the amish.
Great post. I have my own theory for why modern people are less fertile, which is feminism. In traditional societies, there was no concept of gender equality, the *point* of being a female was completely different than the *point* of being a male. The point of being a female in traditional societies was building a family. That's what females are optimized for, biologically, psychologically. Feminism came along and said there ought to be no difference between men and women. Females should strive for the same things as males. This is an example of modern education conditioning people against their basic biological and psychological makeup, which could be a good thing or bad thing depending how you view it. There are lots of other examples besides for feminism (I think the abolition of the death penalty for murderers is another example). But chareidim are as non or anti-feminist as you can get, leading to natural norm of traditional societies.
(At the same time, there is a paradox here, in that modern societies have the fewest children, but medical, agricultural, technological advances result in a much higher world population than any time in history. So it's hard to claim that declining birth rates are unsustainable.)
Charedi society is quite feminist in some ways. It is accepted as totally normal for a woman to be the main breadwinner, and is practically obligatory in Litivish Israeli circles. Sheitels are nearly-universally allowed despite total opposition of Chasam Sofer, Chazon Ish and almost all the authorities Charedim believe themselves to respect.
The truth is that Charedim pragmatically employ elements of feminism to advance their main goals, just like they pragmatically employ elements of anything that is convenient.
True, to the extent that feminism is responsible for allowing many types of jobs for women outside the home, chareidim can said to be using elements of feminism. But that's very different than ideological feminism, which is about equality and empowerment of women. Chareidim don't believe in that at all. The working outside the home is in service of their husband's kollel studies (which is not something the women would even dream of doing themselves), the ultimate goal- as far from feminism as you can get. There is a huge difference between education and expectations of the genders, which is much more traditional than modern, even if it adapts some modern elements.
(Don't understand what sheitels have to do with feminism. Wearing a piece of not very comfortable headgear because the male rabbis say you must doesn't seem very feminist.)
Right, Charedim aren't ideologically feminist; they also aren't ideologically anti-feminist, or traditionalist, or capitalist, or socialist, or anything except ideologically Charedi.
Sheitels are feminist because they are a modification to halacha for no reason other than to mollify female vanity. An anti-feminist community would have no problem enforcing the basic halachic obligation of adult women to cover their hair with a scarf or equivalent and if they cry or whatever, would tell them to keep shut. Women don't mind being uncomfortable if it makes them look better, hence the entire fashion industry.
I don't agree that sheitels are a modification to halacha (it's a very old machlokes), but even if it was, I don't see how a קולא to mollify female vanity has anything to do with feminism. Does feminism have anything to do with women's desire to look beautiful? What about the kulah of using wipes on Shabbos. Is that also feminist, since females are usually changing the diapers?When one sees chassidishe women in Boro Park using the (extremely controversial) eiruv to push strollers, does one think of feminism?
Agreed that chareidim are not ideologically anti-feminist. But neither are most traditional societies. It's just the natural thing for men and women to have different, unequal rolls, nothing really ideological about it.
Feminism is about removing women from under male control. One of the things women do when removed from male control is ostentatiously compete with each other over who looks best and cry when they are not allowed to compete.
Yes, widespread leniency on eruvim is indicative of feminism, though at least, with eruvim, mekilim can lean on Ashkenazi tradition, and various other arguments like being nice to disabled people. There is no legitimate case at all for permitting sheitels worn today. No authority has ever permitted them, unless you could the late leader of Lubavitch. It's just a joke and makes a total mockery of the whole concept of halachic observance. It's purely an issue of giving in to female vanity.
I would say you would have a good point if we had more kulos for females than males, which might indicate that females are not listening to the rabbis as much as males are (although it would still be very far from feminism in the modern sense, in which females expect to have equal power to males). But I don't think this is the case at all if we can go through halacha and check. We have many kulos, some are more applicable to males, some to females. Like the kulah of shaving with a shaver, which is controversial, to mollify young men's vanity. Or the kulah of walking in front of somebody else in the middle of Shemoneh Esreh, almost always applicable to males. Or eating before tekias shofar, applicable to males. Or eating before Krias Shema, applicable to males.
I don't know about that. What are the women's protests if not feminism? And Iran and those other countries are becoming much less religious. Yes, religious hardliners control Iran's government for now, but what the trends in society?
Im lot sure about that. Protesting getting beaten to death isn’t the same as being a feminist. My assumption is that these societies are still overwhelmingly traditional in their beliefs about gender and it’s still not helping fertility rates.
I’m actually an Iranian American who has spent summers in Iran as a kid, so I can give some insight. Average Iranian is much more secular than you think, and this secularism has been driven by an extended backlash to the theocratic government. Iranian youth are divided between a secular majority who are almost as liberal as Western Europeans and a religious minority. The secular majority drinks smuggled alcohol, has premarital sex, and is quite socially liberal overall. This divide exists in all age levels in Iran, but the youth are the most secular-skewed.
No one ever considers that the world itself has limits to the number of human beings and that we are breeding less in order to not over graze the entire planet.
>This is an example of modern education conditioning people against their basic biological and psychological makeup, which could be a good thing or bad thing depending how you view it.
I don't think it is just feminism. History has shown that having a modern society always leads inevitably to a low birthrate.
The difference between America and Israel are two things that I see that you don’t mention. One- the gap in Israel between National Religious/Modern Orthodox and Charedim is far greater and the barrier more impermeable in Israel than America. In America, going to a Modern Orthodox high school and then becoming Charedi afterwards is not all that uncommon. Everyone knows someone like that. Charedi in Israel is more rigid on identifiers, and the difference is based more on intractable differences like the role of settling the Land in the worship of G-d. Whereas in America, it can be a fine point like the attitude towards secular education. Two- In America, most secular Jews are anti-observance, sometimes anti-Observant Jews. In Israel there is a significant number of secular Jews who are warm or at least neutral towards observance. I attribute this to MENA Jews viewing the difference between being observant and non-observant with more fluidity and the antisemitic intergenerational trauma of the Cantonists, the Yevsektsia, things like that strongly affecting Eastern European Jews’ attitudes towards religion till today.
No. I think an intense appreciation for life is the birthright of every Jew. Communism in the USSR, feminism in the US, and other western forces combined with progressive ideas to convince humans that babies are their greatest threat. Some Jewish people very emphatically took that on- the National Council of Jewish Women, for example. Did you ever hear of repro-Shabbat 🤢 literally nauseating? Many (most?) secular American Jews view supporting abortion as a manifestation of their Jewish values. Charedim didn’t invent a family-oriented society that views babies and children as its future. That’s classic Jewish culture. Modern Orthodox is a group of people that found Orthodoxy compelling enough to stick with it in an era where religion is generally mocked. I don’t think modern orthodox needs Charedim to influence them. Take Covid, for example. In America the modern orthodox were fervent covid preventers. The Charedim didn’t view covid as a novel threat. The modern Orthodox were zero affected by the Charedim approach-perhaps it even intensified their covid caution.
Thinking again about the sheitels you spoke about somewhere else in the comments. In the 80’s and 90’s sheitels were a Charedi thing. By now they are commonplace among Modern Orthodox (in America). Mothers who didn’t cover their hair in the 80’s often have a daughter who wears some sort of sheitel- a kippah fall, various styles that target modern orthodox. So that cuts the other way.
Wouldn’t you expect something like this to apply to American Jews, though? Do Modern Orthodox pick up fertility memes from Charedim, Conservatives from Modern Orthodox, sincere Reform Jews from Conservatives, and atheists or partial-Jews from Reform?
As far as I know, none of this happens; US Jewish TFR isn’t high. I can certainly speculate why - maybe American haredim have greater physical and cultural separation from Modern Orthodox than in Israel, maybe non-Jewish memes drown out this influence much more so than they can in a Jewish majority country. But I do think your theory not generalizing to another country is a partial strike against it.
As you say, Orthodox Jews in America mingle very little with non-Orthodox Jews and there are no intermediary groups to transmit mimetic fertility. There is no analogue to what is called 'traditional' in Israel. My theory specifically explains why US and Israeli Jewry are different.
However, I think that you could show that Modern Orthodox Jews have higher fertility in proportion to their contact with Charedim.
Speaking from my experience as a child, I don't think contact with Chabad works that way. You pick up a few aspects of observance, and a kind of elevated Jewyness, but the idea of emulating the local Chabad shliach in his lifestyle generally is not something you do. It's kind of like how Catholics look at a monk. To be influenced to have more children, you have to be surrounded by a lot of high fertility people who you identify with.
It's not just Kazakhstan, it's all of the central Asian ex-Soviet republics. I have pencilled in writing an article about it, but it will have to wait until an epic Wikipedia binge.
You rumbled me. My plan was to lull subscribers into a false sense of security through light swearing and correct use of prepositions then BAM! start haranguing them for being mechalel shabbos for using string eruvim.
You know, my initial reaction to that was a “a sphardi substack?!” but given your other articles I’m going to go with “very particular litvak.” Do you also not hold with eating turkey?
Jokes aside, I enjoyed the articles and look forward to whatever is coming next.
You've convincingly made the point that fertility is not directly related to religiousness, but for those wondering about the situation with Muslim Arab Israelis, here's a study that answers that question:
"In contrast, the correlation between fertility and religiosity is much weaker among Israeli Muslims... We see a parallel reduction across the three levels of religiosity in the 1980s, a 1-child difference in TFR for most of the 1990s between the least and most religious, but then a convergence and reduction for the final decade of observation."
I don’t know if I buy some of the explanations here. I’ve never heard Russians or Ukrainians described as nationalistic, rather deeply apathetic. Ukraine has to kidnap people off the street to fight its war even after being attacked, and Russia is basically running a big mercenary operation with poor steppe kids. It all feels more like “inertia” than genuine love of country. And why would any citizen be proud of these failed states.
I’ve heard similar things about religiosity in the Middle East. That people aren’t really into it anymore. The mullahs aren’t popular, etc. inertia.
TFR for Israel’s seculars is still really high, and they despise the ultra religious. Why wouldn’t they have the same low Jewish TFR as everywhere else? I think they feel real ethnic-nationalist pride in their successful country.
Don’t get me wrong, I think TFR is memetic, but what memes?
"I’ve never heard Russians or Ukrainians described as nationalistic, rather deeply apathetic. "
This is your brain on Tucker Carlson. Yeah, Ukraine has conscription, so did Nazi Germany. Every Ukrainian I have come across was very nationalist and they were mostly Ukrainians living in Israel.
"I’ve heard similar things about religiosity in the Middle East. That people aren’t really into it anymore. The mullahs aren’t popular"
Yeah, and religious theocracy isn't popular in Israel. In Iran it is popular at least enough that the regime has been around 40 years. That requires at least 25% support. The point here is that religiosity can't explain why Israel has high fertility.
"TFR for Israel’s seculars is still really high, and they despise the ultra religious."
The theory doesn't posit that they respect Charedim in any way, which they obviously don't.
This is a strange sort of nationalism that has one living in another country. They should go home and volunteer to fight. Then some poor schmuck won't have to get kidnapped off the street because he can't afford the $5k for a fake medical exemption.
"That requires at least 25% support."
Seems to me that Iranian TFR was higher when it was 75% support or whatever, and fell as people got less religious.
"The point here is that religiosity can't explain why Israel has high fertility."
I sort of agree, but I think ethnonationalism is a "religion" of sorts (and in the Jews case religion = ethnonationalism).
Well, yeah, nationalism is kind of a wacky like that. I can easily find you some hardcore mentalist Zionist who wants to kill a billion people and lives in New Jersey. Ideas are one thing; practice is another. That's part of the reason why it's not really very plausible that people make decisions about how many children to have based on their ideas. The other place I know Ukrainians from, by the way, is the English 'Public' (= private) school system which is full of every type of Eastern European and Russian. Boy can those people regale you will some bullshit that happened in 1820 for five hours.
" Then some poor schmuck won't have to get kidnapped off the street because he can't afford the $5k for a fake medical exemption."
You really need to deplug from populist media. Median salary in Ukraine is $533, everyone can afford 5 bucks. If Ukrainians want to fight for the holy integrity of the pure Slavic race against Mongoloid Russians why shouldn't they use alcoholic bums to do it? Russia does.
"Boy can those people regale you will some bullshit that happened in 1820 for five hours."
And they aren't in Ukraine.
$5k is 10 months salary or so. Apparently many people can't afford it.
Look, your the one telling me that a country everyone has been fleeing for decades that needs to kidnap people off the street to fight its wars is some unique case of nationalism that disproves that nationalism increases TFR. This is not a very empirical assertion.
Makes one wonder whether churchgoing Ukrainians who have 3+ children, maybe even 4-5+ children, can win the admiration of other Ukrainians after the end of this war, causing them to copy their fertility patterns, and so forth for other Ukrainians, et cetera.
I've seen a very similar thing happen at my little American church and a nearby church like it. People join because they like the community or the preaching or whatever, and then a few months later they look around and go, whoa, everybody else here has like 3 or 4 or 5 kids. Kids are everywhere, and they are just a normal thing. A few years go by, and pretty soon that couple that joined is now on baby number 2 or baby number 3 themselves.
I don’t think that is talked about enough. There is increasing large segmentation of the population by age, both in activities and housing. But people just primarily seem to analyze this in terms of race and affluence.
How can we have more mixed-age communities?
Your brutal honesty about religious demographics made me laugh…mostly because it’s true. I’ve never seen someone break it down to the Anglo world in such detail. Do you anticipate becoming a public speaker or building some YouTube channel?
Will definitely become a paid sub.
There isn't a National Amishism, but there are Mennonites who could be compared to the Charedi-adjacent communities in this model. How do Anabaptists as a whole stack up?
In my experience at least with the more traditional Anabaptist churches, they're very close to Amish fertility levels. If the Amish are at 6-7, the rest of the Anabaptist groups probably average out at 4-5.
The difference is, they lose a lot more of their young people. So fertility is high among the ones who stay, but that doesn't account for the ones who leave.
The reason the Amish are growing so rapidly as a group is not only do they maintain high fertility, but they have a culture that provides very stong incentives to stay within the culture, and deliberately handicaps young people in ways that make it very difficult for them to thrive if they leave.
The more conservative and traditional the group, in other words the more of that handicapping they do, the higher their retention rate. The Amish do better than most other Anabaptist groups on that metric.
Great essay! You kind of rejected the nationalism explanation right away. But a variant that only applies to Israel and not other nationalistic cultures is that most regular, secular, Israeli jews still feel a strong obligation to have children because of the very real existential threat that's ever present. This obligation is probably emphasized both from the bottom up and the top down.
What do you make of that?
This is a fair question that I didn't deal with, so:
1) First of all, if we're saying it's nationalism + existential threat, then the first thing to check is whether each individual factor boosts fertility. We've covered nationalism, so do feelings of existential dread boost fertility? It doesn't seem to me either that this is the case, or it is likely that it is the case. If we want to pick combinations of individual factors that only apply to Israel then we can do this pretty much infinitely. For example, Israel is (a) by the beach (b) sixty percent desert and (c) begins with the letter 'I'. Other countries meet 1 or 2 of these criteria, but not all 3, so perhaps this is the true explanation? But obviously not, thus, unless each factor in the proposed combo boost fertility I don't think this is a productive way of theorising.
2) It seems to me that Eastern European countries, especially but not just Ukraine, also have this feeling of existential dread, namely that Russia will conquer them and abolish their nationhood. That may not be a very rational thing to believe in light of Russia's military capability, but it is a widespread belief and it doesn't seem to do anything for fertility. (You can also argue that, given their crummy TFR and massive emigration, Ukrainians are under a genuine existential threat.)
I suppose it's not the existential threat per de (whether or not it really is existential at all). But Israel really is very different than many other countries who share surface level similarities like Ukraine.
Maybe it's in part a result of Israeli jews/zionists having a very strong purpose and vision for their country when it was established, being relatively few in numbers at the beginning and everyone having an explicit and implicit understanding that their needs to be more Israelis/Jews in Israel for the country to thrive and survive. From the start the whole of Israel was more like an Amish community that settled in the Midwest than an already existing country.
I guess I running the risk of just adding more and more variables line you point out making any combination of unique variables part of explanation. But the above really seems like it's quite unique to Israel. The question is whether or not thst background is pertinent to its TFR 70-100 years later.
The two First World countries that, after Israel, most credibly could be said to face an existential threat are South Korea and Taiwan, and they are … not doing terribly well, fertility-wise.
Some say this was the reason for the baby boom in the USA after WWII.
No
All the biological pressure from returning GIs and unmarried women had to go somewhere. A high percentage of newly married couples started their families immediately.
My wife commented that seeing other women with newborns made her wistful. If we had been in our twenties instead of our forties we might have ended up with three or four children.
>My wife commented that seeing other women with newborns made her wistful. If we had been in our twenties instead of our forties we might have ended up with three or four children.
This is a commonly reported phenomenon.
Countries that were neutral in World War 2, or were occupied early (such as Sweden, Spain and Denmark) all experienced baby booms. It was not driven by returning soldiers 'making up' for babies they would've had, had they not been deployed.
I think the synchronization had much to do with it. All those marriages, and pregnancies, and babies, all at once, inspired other women to start or enlarge their families. Even without the pill a woman in a normal marriage does have some influence over her fertility, especially in the positive direction.
Why would there be synchronization in Latin America after WW2?
A sense of "the need to keep the tribe going" is also hypothesized to be a reason for the high TFR among the ethnic German minority in the Alto Adige.
9 languages die every year. That means an entire culture just disappears because people can't be bothered to keep it going. It doesn't seem that fear of cultural extinction is that big a motivator for people in general.
Bothered? A lot of those languages have less than a thousand speakers, living in desperate poverty on the margins of an expanding dominant culture. Cultural survival is a luxury in the face of actual survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction
Most of these languages are not in places where people struggle to find a bite to eat.
Fair point (although some do), but most live in pretty deep poverty from which the only viable escape involves assimilating to the dominant culture.
The question of minority language survival is complicated though - even the Welsh and Irish struggle with it - all I meant was that “can’t be “bothered” seems unnecessarily ungenerous
Fine, breezily irreverent tone is what brings in the subscribers, but it wouldn't always pass a strict accuracy test.
Your larger post is persuasive, but this comment is a little callous.
Of course the European Jews were subjected to near death (literal extinction) in the Shoah but they still had numbers far exceeding most of those tiny indigenous cultures, not to mention enormous cultural and linguistic resources to pull themselves back to cultural flourishing.
I'm responding to the claim that "the high TFR among the ethnic German minority in the Alto Adige". I don't believe this because in most cases where there is a small minority like this they just give up and assimilate. It seems these arguments are made by looking at a tiny minority of the relevant sample group and then making inferences that fit only with that small sample.
Ok
Funny and insightful. Great job dawg.
This is a great piece!
*cough* restack *cough*
I think this is correct. Evangelical christians tend to marry and have kids at a young age. they are somewhat isolated from the mainstream culture but not isolated like the amish.
Also, Mormons
We just need to encourage the “quiver-full” movement
Great post. I have my own theory for why modern people are less fertile, which is feminism. In traditional societies, there was no concept of gender equality, the *point* of being a female was completely different than the *point* of being a male. The point of being a female in traditional societies was building a family. That's what females are optimized for, biologically, psychologically. Feminism came along and said there ought to be no difference between men and women. Females should strive for the same things as males. This is an example of modern education conditioning people against their basic biological and psychological makeup, which could be a good thing or bad thing depending how you view it. There are lots of other examples besides for feminism (I think the abolition of the death penalty for murderers is another example). But chareidim are as non or anti-feminist as you can get, leading to natural norm of traditional societies.
(At the same time, there is a paradox here, in that modern societies have the fewest children, but medical, agricultural, technological advances result in a much higher world population than any time in history. So it's hard to claim that declining birth rates are unsustainable.)
Charedi society is quite feminist in some ways. It is accepted as totally normal for a woman to be the main breadwinner, and is practically obligatory in Litivish Israeli circles. Sheitels are nearly-universally allowed despite total opposition of Chasam Sofer, Chazon Ish and almost all the authorities Charedim believe themselves to respect.
The truth is that Charedim pragmatically employ elements of feminism to advance their main goals, just like they pragmatically employ elements of anything that is convenient.
True, to the extent that feminism is responsible for allowing many types of jobs for women outside the home, chareidim can said to be using elements of feminism. But that's very different than ideological feminism, which is about equality and empowerment of women. Chareidim don't believe in that at all. The working outside the home is in service of their husband's kollel studies (which is not something the women would even dream of doing themselves), the ultimate goal- as far from feminism as you can get. There is a huge difference between education and expectations of the genders, which is much more traditional than modern, even if it adapts some modern elements.
(Don't understand what sheitels have to do with feminism. Wearing a piece of not very comfortable headgear because the male rabbis say you must doesn't seem very feminist.)
Right, Charedim aren't ideologically feminist; they also aren't ideologically anti-feminist, or traditionalist, or capitalist, or socialist, or anything except ideologically Charedi.
Sheitels are feminist because they are a modification to halacha for no reason other than to mollify female vanity. An anti-feminist community would have no problem enforcing the basic halachic obligation of adult women to cover their hair with a scarf or equivalent and if they cry or whatever, would tell them to keep shut. Women don't mind being uncomfortable if it makes them look better, hence the entire fashion industry.
I don't agree that sheitels are a modification to halacha (it's a very old machlokes), but even if it was, I don't see how a קולא to mollify female vanity has anything to do with feminism. Does feminism have anything to do with women's desire to look beautiful? What about the kulah of using wipes on Shabbos. Is that also feminist, since females are usually changing the diapers?When one sees chassidishe women in Boro Park using the (extremely controversial) eiruv to push strollers, does one think of feminism?
Agreed that chareidim are not ideologically anti-feminist. But neither are most traditional societies. It's just the natural thing for men and women to have different, unequal rolls, nothing really ideological about it.
Feminism is about removing women from under male control. One of the things women do when removed from male control is ostentatiously compete with each other over who looks best and cry when they are not allowed to compete.
Yes, widespread leniency on eruvim is indicative of feminism, though at least, with eruvim, mekilim can lean on Ashkenazi tradition, and various other arguments like being nice to disabled people. There is no legitimate case at all for permitting sheitels worn today. No authority has ever permitted them, unless you could the late leader of Lubavitch. It's just a joke and makes a total mockery of the whole concept of halachic observance. It's purely an issue of giving in to female vanity.
I would say you would have a good point if we had more kulos for females than males, which might indicate that females are not listening to the rabbis as much as males are (although it would still be very far from feminism in the modern sense, in which females expect to have equal power to males). But I don't think this is the case at all if we can go through halacha and check. We have many kulos, some are more applicable to males, some to females. Like the kulah of shaving with a shaver, which is controversial, to mollify young men's vanity. Or the kulah of walking in front of somebody else in the middle of Shemoneh Esreh, almost always applicable to males. Or eating before tekias shofar, applicable to males. Or eating before Krias Shema, applicable to males.
I'm not sure what you mean that no authority permitted sheitels? I know that Rav Moshe Feinstein did, and following him almost every non-chassidic posek in America. Where did you see the Chazon Ish prohibited it? I have seen the opposite. I found a list of the matirim and osrim here https://www.yeshiva.org.il/wiki/index.php/%D7%A4%D7%90%D7%94_%D7%A0%D7%9B%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%98%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%94%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%9D#%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D_2
Outside the actual Haredim, I can’t imagine a more feminist society than one where every woman serves in the army!
TFR in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries are also low and we know they don’t have feminism.
I don't know about that. What are the women's protests if not feminism? And Iran and those other countries are becoming much less religious. Yes, religious hardliners control Iran's government for now, but what the trends in society?
Im lot sure about that. Protesting getting beaten to death isn’t the same as being a feminist. My assumption is that these societies are still overwhelmingly traditional in their beliefs about gender and it’s still not helping fertility rates.
I’m actually an Iranian American who has spent summers in Iran as a kid, so I can give some insight. Average Iranian is much more secular than you think, and this secularism has been driven by an extended backlash to the theocratic government. Iranian youth are divided between a secular majority who are almost as liberal as Western Europeans and a religious minority. The secular majority drinks smuggled alcohol, has premarital sex, and is quite socially liberal overall. This divide exists in all age levels in Iran, but the youth are the most secular-skewed.
OK, but they aren't more secular than Israel.
No one ever considers that the world itself has limits to the number of human beings and that we are breeding less in order to not over graze the entire planet.
>This is an example of modern education conditioning people against their basic biological and psychological makeup, which could be a good thing or bad thing depending how you view it.
I don't think it is just feminism. History has shown that having a modern society always leads inevitably to a low birthrate.
.medical, agricultural, technological advances result in a much higher world population than any time in history.
Yes, but much of that population will be elderly and in declining health.
I recommend reading Robin Hanson on this.
"threatening, at a minimum, chronic pension crises, and, in the most extreme cases, the actual extinction of entire nations.
Extinction, yes, but that's no reason to have a pension crisis. That's a matter of adjusting the rules for taxes and benefits.
The difference between America and Israel are two things that I see that you don’t mention. One- the gap in Israel between National Religious/Modern Orthodox and Charedim is far greater and the barrier more impermeable in Israel than America. In America, going to a Modern Orthodox high school and then becoming Charedi afterwards is not all that uncommon. Everyone knows someone like that. Charedi in Israel is more rigid on identifiers, and the difference is based more on intractable differences like the role of settling the Land in the worship of G-d. Whereas in America, it can be a fine point like the attitude towards secular education. Two- In America, most secular Jews are anti-observance, sometimes anti-Observant Jews. In Israel there is a significant number of secular Jews who are warm or at least neutral towards observance. I attribute this to MENA Jews viewing the difference between being observant and non-observant with more fluidity and the antisemitic intergenerational trauma of the Cantonists, the Yevsektsia, things like that strongly affecting Eastern European Jews’ attitudes towards religion till today.
Do you think fertility among MO Jews in America correlates with exposure to Charedim? Are MO in Flatbush more fertile than in Teaneck?
No. I think an intense appreciation for life is the birthright of every Jew. Communism in the USSR, feminism in the US, and other western forces combined with progressive ideas to convince humans that babies are their greatest threat. Some Jewish people very emphatically took that on- the National Council of Jewish Women, for example. Did you ever hear of repro-Shabbat 🤢 literally nauseating? Many (most?) secular American Jews view supporting abortion as a manifestation of their Jewish values. Charedim didn’t invent a family-oriented society that views babies and children as its future. That’s classic Jewish culture. Modern Orthodox is a group of people that found Orthodoxy compelling enough to stick with it in an era where religion is generally mocked. I don’t think modern orthodox needs Charedim to influence them. Take Covid, for example. In America the modern orthodox were fervent covid preventers. The Charedim didn’t view covid as a novel threat. The modern Orthodox were zero affected by the Charedim approach-perhaps it even intensified their covid caution.
Thinking again about the sheitels you spoke about somewhere else in the comments. In the 80’s and 90’s sheitels were a Charedi thing. By now they are commonplace among Modern Orthodox (in America). Mothers who didn’t cover their hair in the 80’s often have a daughter who wears some sort of sheitel- a kippah fall, various styles that target modern orthodox. So that cuts the other way.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown on secular Israeli TFR based on which diaspora they hail from.
Wouldn’t you expect something like this to apply to American Jews, though? Do Modern Orthodox pick up fertility memes from Charedim, Conservatives from Modern Orthodox, sincere Reform Jews from Conservatives, and atheists or partial-Jews from Reform?
As far as I know, none of this happens; US Jewish TFR isn’t high. I can certainly speculate why - maybe American haredim have greater physical and cultural separation from Modern Orthodox than in Israel, maybe non-Jewish memes drown out this influence much more so than they can in a Jewish majority country. But I do think your theory not generalizing to another country is a partial strike against it.
As you say, Orthodox Jews in America mingle very little with non-Orthodox Jews and there are no intermediary groups to transmit mimetic fertility. There is no analogue to what is called 'traditional' in Israel. My theory specifically explains why US and Israeli Jewry are different.
However, I think that you could show that Modern Orthodox Jews have higher fertility in proportion to their contact with Charedim.
The Moishe House / Chabad / Hillel crowd is traditional in the Israeli sense and in contact with Orthodoxy via Chabad.
Speaking from my experience as a child, I don't think contact with Chabad works that way. You pick up a few aspects of observance, and a kind of elevated Jewyness, but the idea of emulating the local Chabad shliach in his lifestyle generally is not something you do. It's kind of like how Catholics look at a monk. To be influenced to have more children, you have to be surrounded by a lot of high fertility people who you identify with.
I like the "social proof" / mimetic model too. The Kazakhs also have rising fertility. Do you think the model fits there?
It's not just Kazakhstan, it's all of the central Asian ex-Soviet republics. I have pencilled in writing an article about it, but it will have to wait until an epic Wikipedia binge.
The youtuber Kaiserbauch has a video called "the booming demographics of Kazakhstan" that may be useful.
Wait this is a frum substack?!
You rumbled me. My plan was to lull subscribers into a false sense of security through light swearing and correct use of prepositions then BAM! start haranguing them for being mechalel shabbos for using string eruvim.
You know, my initial reaction to that was a “a sphardi substack?!” but given your other articles I’m going to go with “very particular litvak.” Do you also not hold with eating turkey?
Jokes aside, I enjoyed the articles and look forward to whatever is coming next.
Lol, הפוך. Turkey is kosher because it has the simanim and that's how we should pasken. Don't need a mesorah.
What does your name mean? Is it a translation? Is it a reference to Enlightenment Maskil? Enlighten Wisdom?
It's a reference to my name, but you need to be boki in Nach to figure it out (though Sefaria might give it to you).
Okay in my defense this was the first article of yours I read.
You've convincingly made the point that fertility is not directly related to religiousness, but for those wondering about the situation with Muslim Arab Israelis, here's a study that answers that question:
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/exceptionalfertilityeng.pdf (Figure 8)
"In contrast, the correlation between fertility and religiosity is much weaker among Israeli Muslims... We see a parallel reduction across the three levels of religiosity in the 1980s, a 1-child difference in TFR for most of the 1990s between the least and most religious, but then a convergence and reduction for the final decade of observation."
I don’t know if I buy some of the explanations here. I’ve never heard Russians or Ukrainians described as nationalistic, rather deeply apathetic. Ukraine has to kidnap people off the street to fight its war even after being attacked, and Russia is basically running a big mercenary operation with poor steppe kids. It all feels more like “inertia” than genuine love of country. And why would any citizen be proud of these failed states.
I’ve heard similar things about religiosity in the Middle East. That people aren’t really into it anymore. The mullahs aren’t popular, etc. inertia.
TFR for Israel’s seculars is still really high, and they despise the ultra religious. Why wouldn’t they have the same low Jewish TFR as everywhere else? I think they feel real ethnic-nationalist pride in their successful country.
Don’t get me wrong, I think TFR is memetic, but what memes?
"I’ve never heard Russians or Ukrainians described as nationalistic, rather deeply apathetic. "
This is your brain on Tucker Carlson. Yeah, Ukraine has conscription, so did Nazi Germany. Every Ukrainian I have come across was very nationalist and they were mostly Ukrainians living in Israel.
"I’ve heard similar things about religiosity in the Middle East. That people aren’t really into it anymore. The mullahs aren’t popular"
Yeah, and religious theocracy isn't popular in Israel. In Iran it is popular at least enough that the regime has been around 40 years. That requires at least 25% support. The point here is that religiosity can't explain why Israel has high fertility.
"TFR for Israel’s seculars is still really high, and they despise the ultra religious."
The theory doesn't posit that they respect Charedim in any way, which they obviously don't.
"they were mostly Ukrainians living in Israel"
This is a strange sort of nationalism that has one living in another country. They should go home and volunteer to fight. Then some poor schmuck won't have to get kidnapped off the street because he can't afford the $5k for a fake medical exemption.
"That requires at least 25% support."
Seems to me that Iranian TFR was higher when it was 75% support or whatever, and fell as people got less religious.
"The point here is that religiosity can't explain why Israel has high fertility."
I sort of agree, but I think ethnonationalism is a "religion" of sorts (and in the Jews case religion = ethnonationalism).
Well, yeah, nationalism is kind of a wacky like that. I can easily find you some hardcore mentalist Zionist who wants to kill a billion people and lives in New Jersey. Ideas are one thing; practice is another. That's part of the reason why it's not really very plausible that people make decisions about how many children to have based on their ideas. The other place I know Ukrainians from, by the way, is the English 'Public' (= private) school system which is full of every type of Eastern European and Russian. Boy can those people regale you will some bullshit that happened in 1820 for five hours.
" Then some poor schmuck won't have to get kidnapped off the street because he can't afford the $5k for a fake medical exemption."
You really need to deplug from populist media. Median salary in Ukraine is $533, everyone can afford 5 bucks. If Ukrainians want to fight for the holy integrity of the pure Slavic race against Mongoloid Russians why shouldn't they use alcoholic bums to do it? Russia does.
"Boy can those people regale you will some bullshit that happened in 1820 for five hours."
And they aren't in Ukraine.
$5k is 10 months salary or so. Apparently many people can't afford it.
Look, your the one telling me that a country everyone has been fleeing for decades that needs to kidnap people off the street to fight its wars is some unique case of nationalism that disproves that nationalism increases TFR. This is not a very empirical assertion.
What countries are nationalist according to your definition? Do you think Israel is the most nationalist country in the world?
I think Israel could claim to be the most nationalist country in the world. Who else?
Makes one wonder whether churchgoing Ukrainians who have 3+ children, maybe even 4-5+ children, can win the admiration of other Ukrainians after the end of this war, causing them to copy their fertility patterns, and so forth for other Ukrainians, et cetera.
So... the explanation is not religiousness, but also it's most definitely religiousness.
It’s a certain highly idiosyncratic relationship between the hyper religious minority and the secular majority.
Israel is much a unique case, in a relatively small comparison set, that theorizing is inevitably slippery