In the 1990s, librarians at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev discovered a cache of unmarked containers. Once opened, they disclosed an archive of Jewish folk music from the early-20th century, including not only song lyrics and sheet music but also recordings that would not be studied systematically for another decade. Jake Marmer tells the archive’s story:

[L]ong before any serious recording technology was invented, without much funding or publicity, groups of ambitious scholars set out on ethnographic expeditions into the heartland of the Ukrainian shtetl world, aiming to capture the community’s folklore, and amassed a treasure trove of material. In recent years, these fragile, virtually unknown recordings were digitized and released in CD format. There are currently nine volumes of music out, with the three latest volumes released just within the past year. These most recent discs included the 1930s recordings of “Jewish Agricultural Colonies of the Southern Ukraine” and . . . a 1913 collection of fieldwork conducted in the Jewish communities of Palestine. . . .

The Jewish archive was started back in 1918, and in those early days . . . many of the early “acquisitions” that came in were the konfiskat—i.e., items confiscated from the wealthy, along with other private property that changed hands in the wake of the 1917 revolution. And then there were also the “library babushkas”: older folks who watched out for abandoned private libraries of those escaping the Soviet regime, or for the closing down of synagogues and study houses. They would quickly drag the items over to the library to prevent looting—at times, endangering themselves in the process.

The archive’s holdings expanded dramatically in the 1930s, when it received a large shipment from Saint Petersburg’s Jewish Museum—a shipment that included materials assembled by the legendary writer-anthropologist S. An-Sky [né Shloyme Zaynvl Rappaport], most famous as the author of The Dybbuk, perhaps the most successful Yiddish play ever produced. . . . An-Sky, like other anthropologists of the early-20th century, used wax cylinders for his recordings. The cylinders work in a manner similar to vinyl discs, with a needle moving in a groove to produce sound. . . .

It was then that the KGB destroyed the filing system that contained the descriptions of the archive’s holdings. . . . When Ukraine became an independent nation in the 1990s, the archive was finally reopened. I innocently asked [the librarian] why the KGB [repressed and nearly destroyed the] archive. She retorted with familiar sarcasm: “Because Jews were bad! Whose fault is it—always and for everything?”

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.