By the 1960s, virtually all of the more than 300 bakers in New York City’s bagel shops belonged to Local 338 of the Bakery and Confectionary Workers, which maintained closed shops and contracts favorable to workers. But then a mobster named Giovanni Ignazio Dioguardi—known as Johnny Dio—who had spent the past few years enriching himself by meddling in the kosher hot-dog business, decided to take on bagels. Jason Turbow describes what followed:

In 1966, a man named Ben Willner started the W&S Baking Corporation in the Bronx. Not only was he determined to run a non-union bagel shop, but he was among the first to embrace what would, over time, become 338’s most pressing issue: automation. . . . With [a mechanical bagel roller], Willner began pumping out more bagels in a shorter time with one unskilled worker than a traditional shop using a union-approved team of four; this allowed Willner to undercut his competitors’ prices substantially. With his bakery location sufficiently north of Local 338’s area of operations, he mostly flew under the union’s radar.

Dio soon showed up at the bakery to bandy about his wholesaling leverage—namely, the ability to get supermarket buyers to bend to his whim under threat of labor unrest. Before long, W&S bagels were being stocked on shelves around the city, and the bakery prospered.

Except that Willner’s weren’t the only mobbed-up bagels in town. In 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys had opened in the center of Jewish New York, on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. Among its principals was Thomas Eboli, otherwise known as Tommy Ryan, a capo in the Genovese crime family and a direct counter to Dio. Eboli was so powerful, in fact, that when Vito Genovese died a few years later, Eboli reigned for a time as the family boss.

Dio may have been a capo [as well], but his Lucchese-family backing was no match for the Genoveses. . . . Inevitably, W&S went out of business, with Willner’s machines ending up at Bagel Boys in clear violation of the union mandate. This was a problem. Eboli, with the Manhattan mafia behind him, made the concerns about Dio seem puny by comparison. A fight was in the offing. The main question was whether—and how—to enjoin it.

Ultimately, the union handled the mafia the same way that it handled nearly all extreme issues with management: full public confrontation. Nearly as soon as Bagel Boys opened its doors, Local 338 members showed up en masse to picket, distributing leaflets headlined, “PLEASE DON’T BUY,” with warnings that non-union bagels “jeopardize the hard-won standards of labor and inspection which the New York City public now enjoy.” Their most effective tactic in such situations was handing out free product in quantities sufficient to devastate business. It worked.

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.