In recent years, sociologists, social commentators, and religious leaders have begun increasingly to speak of a “boy problem,” whereby ever-larger numbers of young men have had trouble making a successful transition into adulthood. Tzvi Sinensky sums up some of the symptoms:

Young men in the West fare poorly in comparison with their female peers in numerous areas, including academic achievement, ADHD diagnosis, sexual abuse and harassment, violent criminal behavior, and imprisonment. There is a clear pattern of decreased male engagement with traditional religious community life. And now, during the pandemic, research shows that, on the whole, young men in particular have found it difficult to cope.

For guidance as to how some of these problems might be addressed, Sinensky turns to the sermon that the late Rabbi Norman Lamm—an outstanding American Jewish leader and scholar who died this past year—gave at his own son’s bar mitzvah in 1972. Sinensky writes:

In his sermon, . . . Rabbi Lamm opens by noting that we live during a time “in which adults habitually grasp at the last straws of their vanishing youthfulness by retrogressing into adolescence and preferring to be boys rather than men.” In such an environment, and upon the occasion of his son’s coming of age, he wonders, what does it take to become a man?

Rabbi Lamm asserts, “To be a man is an achievement.” Manhood is not simply a stage one reaches, but something one attains. He points to the fact that Noah is called a “man” among his other appellations, including “righteous and pure.” This suggests that manhood is itself an attainment.

Rabbi Lamm [urged parents] to invite our young men to join the community of adults by engaging them in conversations centering on matters of substance, through which we can initiate them into the community of the faithful.

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.