Israel stands out among developed countries by maintaining a high fertility rate. Understanding what is driving the continued preference for larger families could offer useful insights for policy makers in Israel and in other countries with high birth rates.

by Rachel Gould, PhD

I’ll start at the end – my PhD research found what appears to be a positive feedback loop in Israel around family size preferences. More than anything, this is what appears to be driving the continued high fertility rates. Jewish Israeli culture is based on community, happiness, social cohesion, support and a distinct understanding that happiness AND validation as an adult member of society comes from family formation.

Most of us here on this platform acknowledge population growth and the strain we put on the environmental limits of the planet as serious matters that demand our attention, no matter how politically unsavory this view might be. How we address what are in fact personal fertility behaviors to help encourage the preference for a small family ethic (Rieder, 2016) is a more difficult topic to find consensus on.

I believe that we need to consider the social influences present in a society and recognize their outsized weight on family size preferences. Social influences are typically normalized into the fabric of society such that they are embedded in our cultures, traditions, and religions. It is challenging to see them, let alone change them. They are likely not uniform across a society but are more nuanced across subsectors of a society.

My paper “Community Pressure Drives Population Pressure,” published in the August 2025 issue of The Journal of Population and Sustainability, makes the case that the most powerful influences on fertility decision making are covert and/or overt social forces, using Israel as a case study.

Israel is the only OECD country with an above replacement fertility rate (Figure 1). It is socio-economically typical of a low-fertility country and yet continues to have a large family norm, particularly among the Jewish sectors of society. At the end of 2025, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported Israel’s population at 10.18 million people. Projections put all of Israeli society on a trajectory toward more than 15 million people on its 100^th anniversary in 2048, with one projection suggesting a population of 20 million people by 2065.

My research focused only on the Jewish sector of society. Israeli society is approximately 80% Jewish, of which 48% identify as secular, 27% identify as traditional, 17% identify as Orthodox, and 8% identify as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox).[1] The other 20% is comprised of Muslims, Christians, and members of other smaller religious groups. While non-Jewish groups tend to have small families, the fertility trends across all religious Jewish sectors do not behave as expected (Figure 2; for more information, see also the excellent summary of the current demographic situation written by Alex Weinreb in 2025 for the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel).

Socio-economic influences on fertility

In my research I looked at the commonly accepted approaches a society uses to encourage smaller families and asked what was happening in Israel. Are fertility responses to gender equity, education, and incomes following the script? And if not, then what might be happening?

Israeli women and men participate in the labor force at near identical rates (Figure 3). While there is room for more gender parity at more senior levels across all sectors, women are not barred from participating economically. Working and mothering are not contraindicated in Israel, even if their wages are lower than those of men (Figure 4).

Women are extremely well educated, representing a larger percentage of students in higher education across all sectors, save for PhDs in STEM fields, and even there the numbers are shifting toward more women (figure 5). In my survey results women holding an academic degree (i.e., BA, MA, PhD) reported desiring and idealizing larger families compared to those without an academic degree. In Israel a woman’s level of education is not a factor in her family size preferences.

Contraception and access to abortion are available through the national health service. Recent efforts have further lowered barriers to abortion access; 99% of women seeking an abortion are granted the procedure.

Life in Israel is expensive, with one of the highest costs of living in the OECD. How can parents deal with having many children? On the surface, the Israeli government provides a broad array of programs to support families, including publicly funded education from age 3, paid maternity/paternity leave, birth grants and monthly cash transfers per child, and tax benefits for parents. However, the benefits provided by Israel pale in comparison to pro-family benefits offered in EU countries. It is a hard argument to make that the government is strongly, fiscally pronatal apart from the excessively generous provisioning of fertility treatments (Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2016).

Survey respondents in 2020 validated this finding in that 81% of respondents felt that the state was NOT encouraging them to have more children (Figure 6).

Follow thy neighbor

This leaves social forces as a potential and real influence on birth rate preferences in Israel. Currently in Israeli society the normal family size is at least three children, including for same-sex couples. Past research suggests that those who have fewer than three might be considered “barren”, find themselves excluded from society, or even not considered fully adult members of society (e.g., Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2016, Bystrov, 2016, Kraft, 2018). But why is this the case?

My survey asked respondents:

• What is the number of children you want to have? (desired family size)
• What is the ideal number of children in a family? (ideal family size)
• How many children on average do other people in your community have? (average family in community)

As seen in Figure 7, within the secular and traditional sectors of Jewish Israeli society there is near consistency between the answers to the three questions. As the self-identified levels of religious observance increase we can notice a shift where what one desires is greater than what one thinks is the societal ideal and even greater than what they believe their neighbors are doing. It is noteworthy that each group estimates its community’s fertility to be higher than it actually is (Figure 2), a clear misalignment between reality and perceptions.

It is important to note that the “very religious” (i.e., Haredi) is the smallest sector of the survey respondents (n=47), which corresponds to their share of the broader Israeli society. It is overly simplistic to label this group “Haredi” or “very religious” when, in fact, the population is quite heterogeneous with pockets of deep insularity that this survey was unable to access.

An additional finding that strongly reinforces the power of social influence, is the preferences from respondents who were born in the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Israel absorbed a massive wave of immigration from the FSU in the 1990s. These immigrants, like all before them, came with their own fertility preferences (Tal, 2016). Just one generation ago FSU Jewish Israelis averaged one child per family (Nahmias, 2004; Tolts, 2015). My survey results show that the current generation of Jewish FSU Israelis, many of whom were children in the FSU, now desire 2.72 children on average and idealize 3.21 children in a family. Schifris and Okun (2024) examined this population with similar findings, which may offer insights into other immigrant fertility theory.

Public discourse reinforces norms

Taken all together, these findings point to the prevalence of socio-cultural influences in Israeli society driving a positive feedback loop encouraging large families. The following examples taken from recent, popular publications reinforce this finding.

An article in Hadassah Magazine, a publication of a major American Jewish organization, discussed unique approaches to cancer treatment for women being developed at a hospital in Jerusalem. Along with innovative treatments, the article highlighted the inclusion of fertility decision making as part of the cancer treatment. The treatment plans included considering when and how women undergoing cancer treatment can pause treatment in order to have a pregnancy, and preserving eggs and uterine tissue to allow for a future pregnancy.

Since the October 7^th attack, there has been a noteworthy increase in the requests for and use of posthumous sperm retrieval. This is something sought by the parents, widows, and fiancées of those killed. What might be considered a bridge too far in other societies has been accepted by Israelis – precisely because the desire to have children is nearly universally foundational in Israeli society.

Is demography destiny?

Israel is situated in a unique position globally, as seen in Figure 8. Professor Dan Ben-David, President of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, makes a compelling argument for Israel to be concerned about its population growth. Israel sits on a line between the United States and Burundi when we look at fertility rates and GDP. The country can go in either direction but it is not clear that it can maintain its place in the middle.[3] This is an existential decision the country must make, and it may well provide a model for consideration for other high fertility countries. Is it possible to maintain an ever-expanding population with a high fertility rate and a strong GDP? This figure suggests that a country must decide between being high income or high fertility.

My research suggests that the most important factor to consider in a high fertility country is the role of social, cultural, and religious influences. This is in line with other research and means that policy makers must expand their thinking beyond economics, education, and gender equity. What are the options to consider that might have an influence on the social mores of a community or society? Who are the influential members of society who can help set a new course for smaller families? Is it even possible to effectively counter the influence of social norms like these? Only then, I would argue, can we make real progress in reducing fertility rates in Israel and other high fertility countries.

References

Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. 2016. ‘Thirty-five years of assisted reproductive technologies in Israel’. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online 2: 16–23.

Bystrov, E. 2016. ‘Religiosity, nationalism and fertility among Jews in Israel revisited’. Acta Sociologica 59 (2): 171–186.

Kraft, D. 2018. ‘Israel booms with babies as developed world’s birth rates plummet. Here’s why’. Christian Science Monitor, 14 December. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2018/1214/Israel-booms-with-babies-as-developed-world-s-birth-rates-plummet.-Here-s-why (accessed 30 August 2022).

Nahmias, P. 2004. ‘Fertility behaviour of recent immigrants to Israel: A comparative analysis of immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union’. Demographic Research 10: 83–120.

Schifris, G. and Okun, B. 2024. ‘Descriptive Finding Cohort fertility of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union’. Demographic Research 50: 377-392. 10.4054/DemRes.2024.50.13

Tal, A. 2016. The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Tolts, M. 2015. ‘Demographic transformations among ex-Soviet migrants in Israel’. In E. Lederhendler and U. Rebhun (eds.), Research in Jewish demography and identity, pp. 146–168. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Weinreb, A. 2025. ‘Israel 2025: A Demographic Fork in the Road’. Jerusalem: Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17890510 (accessed 19 February 2026)

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[1] Data taken from https://data.jppi.org.il/en/dashboard/demography/, accessed on March 25, 2026.

[2] All graphs used from the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research can be accessed here: https://www.shoresh.institute/graphs.html

[3] I have taken a course with Professor Ben-David, know him personally, and have heard him make this argument at conferences and in informal conversations.