In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews. By 1945, the Third Reich had trimmed that down to 11.0 million. Today, we’re hovering somewhere between 15.8 and 16.5 million. We’ve essentially spent the last eight decades treading water just to get back to a baseline that was set nearly a century ago.

On a planetary scale, the Jewish community is effectively a statistical anomaly.

World Population: ~8.3 billion
Jewish Population: ~16.5 million
The Reality: That’s 0.2%.

If the world were a village of 1,000 people, you’d have exactly two Jews. Good luck getting a minyan together for a funeral in that village; you’re eight people short and mathematically irrelevant.

Canada likes to puff its chest out because we host the fourth-largest Jewish community on the map, trailing behind the heavy hitters like Israel and the States. But let’s look at the actual density:

Canada Population: ~41.5 million
Jewish Population: ~398,000
The Reality: That’s 1.0%.

Even in a “top-tier” hub like Canada, the Jewish community is a rounding error.

You’re looking at a group of people who could fit comfortably into a handful of suburban postal codes in Toronto and Montreal, yet they still manage to take up a disproportionate amount of space in the heads of conspiracy theorists and census takers alike.

It’s a slow-motion recovery that highlights one thing: it’s a lot faster to destroy a population than it is to rebuild one, especially when the world keeps finding new ways to make the math difficult.

During genocides populations go down, and the Holocaust Genocide of Jews still hasn’t been corrected in raw numbers.

Kvetch and Release with Jon Liedtke is a podcast of all of my radio interviews, reporting, commentary, media interviews, and more!

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