The Haredi world is the fastest-growing part of the Jewish people, and the arithmetic is straightforward: total fertility in Haredi communities has long run at roughly three times the surrounding average, and retention is high.
Israel's Haredi population is around thirteen per cent of the population and rising steadily; official Israeli projections have it approaching a quarter within a generation. The other large concentrations are in New York and its satellite towns, notably Kiryas Joel and New Square, and in London's Stamford Hill, Montreal, Antwerp and Melbourne. Yiddish, written off as a dying language in the 1960s, has more native speakers under twenty than it has had in decades because of this growth.
Two pressures dominate current Haredi life, and both are matters of public record. The first is economic. Large families, extended full-time Talmud study for men, and limited secular curriculum in boys' schools together produce very high poverty rates; in most Haredi households women are the principal earners. Arguments over the secular content of state-funded Haredi schooling have reached the courts in New York and Britain. The second is military service. The Israeli exemption for full-time yeshiva students, granted at the state's founding to a few hundred men, now covers tens of thousands; the Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled the arrangement unlawful, and successive governments have fallen or nearly fallen over attempts to legislate around it. Since 2023 the issue has become acute.
Internally, the world has also faced sustained scrutiny over the handling of child sexual abuse, where the traditional prohibition on informing to secular authorities has been publicly challenged by survivors and by some rabbinic authorities, and over the treatment of those who leave, who describe the loss of family, language and qualifications as close to total.