In one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s best-known paintings, a bearded man in a top hat stands behind most of the other figures, with his back toward the viewer and his face partially obscured. Experts, along with many of Renoir’s contemporaries, have identified this man as the Jewish art critic and art collector Charles Ephrussi. Menachem Wecker writes:

Born in 1849 in Odessa, Ephrussi came from a wealthy Jewish family, which made its money in grain exporting and banking. By the 1870s, he was living in Paris, and anti-Semitism was on the rise. . . .

Ephrussi first collected Italian Renaissance works. . . . He was also interested in Japanese art, newly fashionable in Paris at the time. . . . At age twenty-eight, he debuted as a writer for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, where he would remain for nearly 30 years, [eventually] as co-owner and director. . . .

Ephrussi rubbed elbows with Parisian elite and his reputation as an art historian grew, but he was nevertheless treated unfairly. . . . Edmond de Goncourt, [a] French man of letters, . . . wrote, “Ephrussi the Jew went to six or seven parties a night, so that he could climb to a position at the Ministry of Fine Arts.” And the English author George Painter, who was Marcel Proust’s biographer, recorded that people made fun of Ephrussi’s “Polish Jewish” accent. . . .

Not only did Ephrussi buy work from the Impressionists and write about them, but he also “won over” other clients for the Impressionists. [He] helped Renoir in particular find buyers in the French Jewish community. . . . But Renoir too would write in an anti-Semitic manner about Ephrussi, and their relationship [subsequently] cooled.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.