Israel’s Future-Oriented Natalism: A Q&A with Daniel Kane 

Contributing editor Devorah Goldman sits down with Daniel Kane to discuss his Public Discourse essay “Reflections on Israel’s Exceptional Fertility.” This essay was published in September 2024. Among other things, Devorah and Daniel discuss the policy implications behind Israel’s steady fertility rate and how Israeli parenting philosophies differ radically from those of Americans. 

Devorah Goldman: People all over the Western world are trying to figure out how to increase the birth rate, it seems—from Elon Musk to those on the right who are fascinated by Hungary’s policy attempts to incentivize having children. At the same time, many Western citizens have complicated or troubled ideas about parenthood. You had the personal experience of moving from one country to another, with very different environments around children and family life.  

I’d like to situate you a bit within the context of the essay. Where are you from? What part of Israel did you move to? What prompted that move?  

Daniel Kane: I grew up in Austin, Texas. My family was very Jewish, but not very religious. We belonged to a Conservative synagogue that we rarely went to. And we were Zionists, but Aliyah was not something that people talked about or aspired to do; I didn’t grow up knowing people who had moved to Israel. I worked for a few years after college in DC, and I was becoming more religious. At the same time, I was thinking more about Zionism and how that related to my increased religiosity.  

One thing led to another. I took a trip to Israel, and I decided I needed to give it a shot. So in 2021, I moved to Jerusalem to start a master’s program at Hebrew University. And I’ve stayed in Jerusalem ever since. I live in an area called Ramot, which is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, in a community of what we call dati l’umi: religious-national, modern Orthodox people. 

DG: Growing up, did you ever anticipate that you might move to another country, where you didn’t know the language?  

DK: I actually moved a lot when I was young. I did a year abroad in China in high school, later did a year abroad in Spain, and just traveled a lot. None of those felt like places that I would ever live, even when I was traveling there. They never felt like home. But Israel did, in a remarkable, surprising, and a little bit of a shocking way. And that’s ultimately where I decided I needed to put down roots. 

DG: In your essay, you note: “For better and for worse, there are unattended children everywhere here: running through the streets, singing together on buses, and rioting through any store that dares to sell toys or candy. This presence undoubtedly contributes to the prevailing sense of total chaos that reigns over every Israeli park and mall, but it is also, I suspect, the reason for the undeniable feeling of vibrancy that characterizes Israeli society in general.”

The attitude toward kids in much of the West is quite different, it seems to me. People roll their eyes at kids on airplanes or in restaurants. Kids are loud and disruptive and often unwanted in many public spaces. There are gated communities in Florida where no one under the age of fifty-five or so is permitted to live. Child-free weddings are pretty common and there’s growing interest in the “child-free” or “double-income-no-kids” lifestyles. Can you share some observations on the differences between Israel and other Western societies in this regard?  

DK: It seems like it’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you live in a society with really high birth rates, you’re used to dealing with kids, and you expect to deal with kids. You can’t walk around with the expectation that you’ll be able to impose your preferences or that you’ll even have those desires, or that it will even occur to you that there could be a space that was kid-free. In Israel, I’ve never even heard of it. 

DG: Are there child-free weddings in Israel?  

DK: It could be that there are parts of Israel where that’s trendy. I’ve been to a range of weddings, and I’ve never seen anything like that. On the contrary. Every wedding that I’ve been to, including some in downtown Tel Aviv, it’s expected that people will come with their children, and that informs the kind of environment that we’re creating as well. 

The only other thought I had was its density; Israel is built much more like Europe in that very few people have private homes. Lots of apartments are built close to each other with playgrounds in between them, and so you get to know your neighbors’ kids. You see kids running around. I’m looking out my window right now. I’m forty feet from the apartment building across from me, and there are four apartments on top of each other, and each one of those families has five kids, and—I hear them. Sometimes when I don’t want to! But that’s just a part of life. It’s baked into the physical environment here. 

DG: Let’s go to the very start of your essay, where you invoke the biblical Jacob’s blessing to his grandsons in Genesis. You invoke this again at the end of your essay. And you note that your wife sings this blessing to your daughter as a lullaby; my brother does that as well with his kids. It’s a lovely, well-known song in Hebrew that I grew up hearing, but, for me at least, it hits the ear slightly differently in English. It goes as follows: 

The Angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the youth.
Through them, may my name be remembered,
And the names of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be a teeming multitude within the Land. 

The idea that children should become a teeming multitude within the land sounds a bit strange to the American ear, maybe. Why do you think it resonates so strongly, though? What do you make of the fact that that is a blessing that is so well known in Judaism? 

DK: In the Hebrew, the term is vayidgu, “may they be like fish.” It’s a very intensely Old Testament kind of expression that sounds very weird and is very hard to even render into English. But I think it cuts to one of the major themes of the essay, which is the centrality of that expectation and that hope in Jewish religious life.  

In Genesis, there is the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Then you have the idea repeated in the different blessings given to the tribes of Israel. And there is God’s promise to Abraham to make him like the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the beach. There’s this very deep part of the Jewish religious tradition that understands this to be a blessing. I think Jews have deeply internalized that. 

DG: Yes, absolutely. The religious and cultural emphasis on the idea that children are a blessing, I think, cuts against an increasingly prevalent notion in America that children are disruptive and annoying or indulgences or accessories, which undergirds some of the child-free movement. But there is also the idea that raising children is very psychologically stressful. There’s a method called “gentle parenting,” which is all over social media; it’s a therapeutically influenced approach to raising kids, in which parents are almost terrified of psychically injuring their children. There’s some good satire on parents who seem incredibly wary of possibly harming their child emotionally in any way.  

It’s the subject of much of Abigail Shrier’s recent book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. I’ll quote a short passage:  

The more closely we tracked our children’s feelings, the more difficult it became for us to ride out their momentary displeasure. The more closely we examined our kids, the more glaring their deviations from an endless array of benchmarks, academic, speech, social, and emotional. Each now felt like a catastrophe. . . . Millions of us bought into [therapeutic trends], believing they would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted kids. Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why? 

I’m curious if that was something you noticed moving from America to Israel: that in some American communities, there’s a sense of terror or intense neuroticism around any possible childrearing misstep. My impression is that in Israel, it’s not quite like that. There’s a little bit more of a rough-and-tumble approach to parenting. 

DK: I think it’s definitely true. It’s funny, though, because I think it’s absolutely the case here that the language of disabilities and traumas is used a lot. It’s to the point where my wife, who has a degree in structural engineering, has complained to me repeatedly how annoyed she was that the vast majority of test takers in all of her tests at universities qualified for extended time on their exams. It is interesting, and I think there is certainly, of course, real mental illness here, too. People talk about it, and they’re aware of it. 

But I think the posture that Shrier describes is a luxury that the vast majority of Israelis can’t afford to indulge. For example, a striking difference between Israeli teenagers and American teenagers is that Israeli teenagers are very conscious of the fact that they’re all going to be drafted. When they’re sixteen, they already have friends who are getting drafted, and in times like these, who are in combat zones. 

I think the trends exist, and of course, the reality of mental illness exists, but the way that Israelis relate to it has to be different. There’s no expectation that you’re going to be able to shelter your children from the potentially traumatic facts of reality, which in Israel mean terrorism, and missiles, and bomb shelters. All the kids I know right now, like my own daughter, regularly go to the bomb shelter, and it’s a part of life. So I think your expectations change in terms of what you feel you can control. Reality encroaches on your parenting in a kind of ferocious way, and I think that makes the kids more resilient. 

DG: It’s not so much a contrast in ideology as a contrast in reality. Some of the most neurotic Americans do not have to face some of the grittier parts of life, yet are basically trained to spend a lot of time examining their feelings in all kinds of experiences that might be challenging but are also normal.

Shrier, for example, talks about her worry that she had been sending her son to piano lessons for her own reasons, like prestige, rather than because it was what was best for him. This was after one of her friends questioned her motives in getting him lessons. And so she started interrogating him and interrogating the teacher, asking: does he really want to be there or not? This went on, Shrier says, until the very stern Russian piano teacher shut her down, saying something like: it doesn’t matter if he enjoys it every moment. He needs to just learn it. It’s hard to imagine Israeli parents thinking this way, even if it’s not because they have some kind of thought-out ideological difference regarding mental health. 

DK: Again, it’s partly a chicken-and-egg thing. If you have four kids and you both work full-time jobs, who has time to sit around and talk to the piano teacher about whether your kid really wants to be taking lessons?  

DG: It also seems like parents want to work hard. To paraphrase Shrier, it’s almost as if they want to tell their kids, look how hard I’m working for you, look at all the intensive, exhausting attention I’m pouring into stuff like checking in with the piano teacher 500 times. In exchange, you ought to love me and be kind and grateful. I’m giving you and your feelings an extreme amount of focus.  

But Shrier concludes that all this attention has produced pretty miserable people who’ve been handed a mess of anxieties. In Israel, you don’t have time for this. It’s an interesting contrast of environments. 

DK: That also speaks to an underlying narcissism on the part of the parents. That kind of investment in your child is not always about the child. Few people here can afford to spend all this time thinking about how to create the perfect life and thinking that their children are particularly special, or that they, by extension, are particularly special. I think you have to have a certain amount of free time and wealth to live like that. Israel, for all of its wonderful success, just isn’t like that.  

DG: I think many of the parents who are so obsessive are exhausting themselves. I guess in Israel, that extra level of exhaustion is not an option.  

But to go back to the idea of children in Judaism, you note that fertility is high among a variety of religious groups. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in the US, where marrying young and having multiple kids is highly encouraged. But as you note, “what makes Israeli fertility truly remarkable among developed nations is the fact that elevated fertility rates are not limited to its devout religious minority. . . Even if you excluded its Orthodox Jewish population, the Jewish-Israeli birthrate would still be substantially higher than the overall birthrates of the US, Canada, or any country in Europe.”  

I’m curious what you think accounts for that. 

DK: I cheated a little bit in the essay, because I say that, and then immediately my answer is, in a sense, religion. And the reason I feel like I can say that is because, despite the fact that only 25 percent of Israelis identify as religious, that 25 percent is split about evenly between modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews. But the 75 percent of those who don’t identify as religious still have, by OECD standards, an above-average birth rate, and an above-replacement-level birth rate. 

But if you actually look at that group in terms of what they’re doing day to day, week to week, year to year, in terms of their religious observance (and there’s really good data here), it’s pretty shocking. Upwards of 90 percent of Israelis observe a Passover Seder. Upwards of 90 percent of Jewish Israelis circumcise their sons. Seventy percent of Jewish Israelis have a Friday night meal on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and most of them will do some form of ritual observance in the course of that family meal: for example, the lighting of the candles, the blessing over the wine, the blessing of the children. And if you take all of that together, what you’re left with is that the behavior of self-described secular or nonreligious Israelis is more religious than that of religiously identified Christians in Western Europe.  

And so, my explanation for this seeming mystery of why nonreligious Israelis seem to have birth rates that are so elevated is that actually, despite their self-description, they’re still deeply tied up in, and their lives are informed by, the Jewish religion. 

DG: That’s fascinating. I also think praising or thanking G-d is commonplace among Israelis who don’t consider themselves religiously Orthodox; it’s not really an atheistic culture. As a corollary, I’d guess that almost everyone in the US probably celebrates some form of Christmas. People get together with their families, maybe they even go to a church service, but they might not consider themselves to be committed believers or regularly practicing Christians. But of course, the birth rate in America has declined for a while. There is something about the non-Orthodox Jewish, Israeli approach to religion that has led people a different way. I’m curious if you could explore that a bit more. 

DK: It’s interesting that all the statistics that I just threw out focus on rituals that are not tied to synagogue attendance or prayer life, but to the home. So, I don’t know what percentage it is, but I imagine a pretty high percentage of Americans go to church at least once a year on Christmas or Easter. But what we’re talking about is more than 70 percent of Jewish Israelis getting together with their families every week on Friday night and having a ritualized meal—to varying degrees—in the traditional style of the Jewish religion. So what they’ve preserved are the elements of Jewish religious life which are home-based. I don’t think that’s an accident.  

The center of Jewish religious life is the home, not the synagogue. The synagogue is where you go to pray, and that’s important. But the center, the focal point, is what we do around our table with our families and our parents, our kids. I think that quality of secularized Jewish religious practice is what makes it different. 

DG: And of course, as you note, to go back to the blessing that Jacob gave his grandchildren and that has become a common lullaby, there is a vital emphasis on continuity and family, the belief that that children are a blessing to the world. There’s also a great deal of emphasis on family lineage in the Hebrew Bible, like an underlying music. It suggests the idea that family ties are real, that family life is vital.  

I’ve also reflected on the idea that Jewish holiday rituals in themselves, the actual obligations, are very easily guided toward enjoyment for kids. On Passover, you’re re-enacting a grand story, kids ask the four questions, they hide the afikomen. Other holidays like Purim or Sukkot are inherently fun for children.  

DK: Definitely. But I think the thing about the Jewish holidays is that they’re not just for the kids; they’re for the family, including the kids. I’m distantly related to some secular Israelis who live outside of Tel Aviv, and their kids go to a secular school, but they learned about Sukkot, where you build a Sukkah, a hut outside of your house. And by the demand of the children, the family has started building a sukkah every year, because it’s fun. And now the parents are into it. When you build a Sukkah, you build it together as a family.  

So now everyone gets together, every Sukkot, and they build a sukkah without taking on any other religious obligations. I think every Jewish holiday involves some element of something we’re going to do or build as a family. You’re supposed to do it. It’s not just a tradition that people decide for themselves.  

DG: Let’s pivot to the policy world. You note that there are three key Israeli policies that foster the booming birth rate, including generous taxpayer-funded maternity leave and direct financial aid for parents. You and your wife were paid at the hospital after your daughter’s birth rather than being presented with a bill, which I found striking. You note that alongside tax relief, “an Israeli couple with four kids can expect to collect about $49,500 from the state over the course of their children’s infancy and adolescence.” You also note that, to your Israeli friends and family, the expense of raising kids in America sounds like madness.  

Can you say a bit more about this contrast regarding the financing of children? Do you think children are seen as kind of an indulgence or just overwhelming expense in the US? 

DK: The tax relief and aid make a huge difference when it comes to having kids. But I would say it’s everything, a range of policies, including healthcare. Let me say it like this: the costs of having a child are often high, and they’re definitely higher in America. But the real risk, and the real difference between Israel and America, lies in the marginal cases. It’s not that “I’ll have to pay what on average everyone pays.” It’s the possibility that I’ll have to pay a lot more than that, and in that case, I don’t know what I’m going to do. What if I have to take off longer for maternity leave? What if I have a kid with a health condition? What if the pregnancy is complicated? What if I can’t get to a hospital that’s in-network at the time of my delivery?  

These things never occur to Israelis. They go to whatever hospital is closest to them and they assume that all medical expenses will be covered. That changes the risk assessment, the sense that you have to take this leap into parenthood, and that you’re taking this big risk, and it’s terrifying for a thousand different reasons. One of them, health expenses, we can mitigate, and the Israeli system does. Not entirely, of course, but substantially.  

DG: On the subject of health, and children’s and women’s health in particular, I know you don’t discuss feminism in the essay, but it seems to me that feminism has collided with the idea of maternity and maternity leave in weird ways.  

For example, I could envision a version of feminism that supports a policy like what Israel has, lengthy taxpayer-funded maternity leave, because women are the people who bear children. And if we want their contributions in the workforce as well, then we ought to support them during the times when they are physically weakened. Pregnancy and postpartum recovery are a part of life. And instead, it seems that feminism has, for a long time, pushed women to operate as much like men as possible. So there is a lot of support for abortion rights and birth control, and essentially for casting pregnancy as an avoidable hardship, or something that ought to be gotten over quickly or discouraged where possible. Many women are offered unpaid maternity leave with terms that are up to their employer, alongside abortion and birth control. Israeli policies are not only very supportive of maternity leave but supportive of mothers in other ways. I’m curious if you have anything to say about that issue. 

DK: It’s funny, but it almost feels to me like the Israeli response to this new situation that we found ourselves in, in which women are often working full-time, has almost been to just dodge the kind of Western framing of how feminism fits into it. Of course, feminism is a real force here, and it’s changed a lot about Jewish life and Israeli life, but it seems to me that the response of Israeli society was mostly just to say, “we like families.” And this is a logical extension of that commitment to the family.  

I was really struck by something in this regard: in my mind, my wife having to take time off from work was going to involve a complicated sort of negotiation or result in unspoken tension, perhaps, with her employer. That couldn’t have been further from the case. People are generally and genuinely really happy to see people having kids, and they’re supportive of it. Of course, there are exceptions, and there are tensions that still remain. But it doesn’t come down to questions about the proper role of women or how women fit into the workforce as much as questions around how to support families, given that women are now in the workforce.  

DG: That makes a lot of sense. It’s great, because there are so many stories of women who are embarrassed to admit that they’re pregnant at work or are embarrassed to have gone to an Ivy League school or some other kind of prestigious educational program and who later take time off to stay at home with their kids. It’s almost like their peers make them feel as if they should have given their spot to someone else if they weren’t going to use their education in the most career-oriented way. It’s nice to see that there are places where that is celebrated or encouraged, and women are supported in both directions. 

You also write that “public policy alone is insufficient to ensure natural population growth.” I think this is a natural extension of the conversation we’ve been having. These policies seem like a natural reflection of Israeli culture. And we already talked about the religious part of Israeli culture that drives this welcoming approach to children. Is there anything else that struck you as a new parent in Israel? Anything that Americans should know? 

DK: One thing that I think is important that I didn’t talk about in the essay, but that has really struck me more and more, is the role of extended families in supporting parents. I think this is a function both of the community orientation and the kind of familial qualities of Israeli-Jewish life that we’ve talked about. But I also think it’s a function of proximity. Israel is unbelievably small. And almost everyone lives close to their families. You have to really go out of your way to be more than a five-hour drive away from your parents, from where you grew up. And this is partially just a reflection on being a new parent in general, but since having a child, I’ve learned that it clearly is not supposed to be just you and your spouse caring for your kids. It requires not just support and energy and time, but also wisdom and experience that young parents just do not have (and couldn’t have). Having grandparents around, or more experienced siblings and brothers-in-law to guide you, makes a huge difference. Growing up in America, I did not see very much of that. But here, it’s everywhere. 

DG: Regarding proximity, there is this growing trend in America around trad culture, trad families, homesteading, people with similar beliefs living right near each other. I think Shabbat helps with that in Jewish culture. You need to be able to walk to your synagogue or neighbors on the Sabbath, when you can’t text or drive.  

DK: Even among secular Israelis who drive, there is the expectation that you’re not just having family meals on Thanksgiving, but, in many cases, at least a few times a month.  You’re going to show up at your parents’ house with your kids. You’re going to bring the grandkids, and you’re going to have dinner with them on Shabbat, far more than just a few times a year.  

DG: That is one of my favorite elements of Israeli culture.  

And thank you, this was a wonderful conversation. I hope readers enjoy the essay and your reflections.  

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