Seven years ago, the YIVO Institute launched the Edward Blank Vilna Online Collections project, an attempt to digitize an enormous number of photographs, pamphlets, poems, and other precious artifacts that were rescued from Lithuania following World War II. It is now complete and will soon be available online. Writing about her experiences working on the collection, Alyssa Quint notes that “radical access” to these artifacts stands to transform our understanding of “what East European Jewry was, and . . . our sense of the past.”

This will not be an overnight affair. There is no smoking gun, for instance, no star document that will shine a light on utterly undiscovered worlds. But there are many missing chapters in the story of Ashkenazi Jewry and many more chapters that lack detail and relatability. With instantaneous access to these collections, the energy of scholars, translators, performers, composers, artists, and genealogists will tell these stories with unprecedented ease. It provides an opportunity, not so much to rewrite history, but to write it in a way in which the energy of its historians is finally matched by the availability of primary sources.

And with shifts in history will come shifts in collective memory. In fact, if anything could do this, the digitization of the Vilna Collections might decisively shift Jewish memory away from its center of gravity in the six-year period of World War II, toward and throughout the hundreds of years of creativity that preceded it.

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.