Prager is not Orthodox and a lot of people are upset about him being invited to an O.U. event.

Rabbi Korobkin says the O.U. got a telephone message from a local leader of left-wing Orthodoxy complaining about Prager's inclusion. That Prager was intolerant of other religions because he wants Muslim congressman Keith Ellison to take his swearing in oath on a Bible (in addition to the Koran).

Dennis: "If we Jews think we are secure in America because of the constitution and not because of the Bible, we are fools."

"Of all the ethnic groups in America, we are the most foolish."

"The great majority of serious Jews are Orthodox."

"On the great moral issues of life, you and I are in agreement 99% of the time... Because we both believe the Torah comes from God."

"The average Orthodox rabbi and Reform rabbi share almost nothing [in values]."

"You turned out to be right... I could not argue against it -- the ordination of women. The adding of vast numbers of females to the Jewish and Christian clergy has not helped those religions. Women bring gifts that are different than what clerical leadership need. Women prefer compassion to standards and clergy have to prefer standards to compassion."

"Faith matters a great deal. When I grew up [in Orthodoxy], everything was halakah. About once a year, one of the rabbonim might have a hashkafa [worldview] shiur where God might be mentioned. In my Orthodox world, the question was never what does God want. It was, what's the halakah?"

"It's hard to argue that God does not women to be able to marry if their husbands refuse a get [divorce]. Why even ask what does God want if my only question is, what is the halakah?"

"The eruv is baloney. It is a legal fiction. We're going to fool ourselves that it is ok to wheel our kids to shul."

"I can't believe that God wants a woman [a mother of young children on Shabbos] to be under house arrest because there's not a string around the city."

"I believe that God doesn't want us to look silly in the eyes of the nations. The L.A. Times article [on the Venice eruv] makes Orthodox Judaism look silly. You can't blame the L.A. Times."

"I believe that God wants Pesach [Passover] to be seven days [rather than the eight days now observed by traditional Jews in the diaspora]. That's what he wrote. The Torah's from God."

"The siddur [prayer book] is too long. The maxzor [High Holiday prayer book] is too long. Nobody understands the piyutim [which make a Rosh Hashanah morning prayer service last over six hours]."

"Then I have Orthodox friends tell me, 'Dennis, at our hashkama minyan, we do everything in 90 minutes.' Then you have to say the prayers so fast they become gibberish. Evelyn Wood [speed reader] grew up Orthodox."

"I believe that the Torah wants Pesach to be seven days because it recreates creation. Judaism stands on two pillars -- creation and the Exodus from Egypt. When you make it eight days, you lose the whole point of what HaShem wanted."

"Are we a Kiddish HaShem in the way we kill animals? We had the most humane way to kill animals...but do we today? I don't think so."

"Kosher veal? It's killed in a painless way but it is raised in a painful way."

"I wish I could say that halakah [Jewish law] makes people good."

"My dad has been Orthodox his whole life. Even though he enlisted in World War II, he noticed all these yeshivot popping up in New York during World War II so Jews could avoid service in the armed forces by studying to become rabbis. All these goyim are fighting Hitler and all these frum Jews are enrolling in yeshiva to not fight Hitler."

"The finest Jews I have known have tended to be Orthodox."

Dennis complained about Orthodox Jews who don't greet gentiles on the Sabbath.

"When I first met Rabbi Adlerstein, he was not the same. He had to get halakic permission to go on Religion on the Line (KABC) and dialogue with non-Jewish clergy. Today he's a leader in Jewish life in talking to Christians and meeting with them and hugging them."

Rabbi Adlerstein: "Just the men."

Dennis: "The tradition with Conservative Judaism is not the non-fidelity to halakah. They [the rabbis] are overwhelmingly faithful to halakah... The problem with Conservatism is that they don't believe the Torah is divine."

Dennis says it is wrong that we have to stand during Neilah (and much of the High Holiday prayer services). "If you had to stand during my talk, all you'd think about is when you could sit down."

"We're stuck with standing up more than any other religion."

"You can't say anything in Orthodox life that something rabbinic is a bad idea."

Dennis says that only two or three people in his yeshiva class did not cheat.

"Joseph Telushkin was a Republican ten years before I was."

A young man gets up and says how disgusted he is that Prager was invited to speak and to criticize the Orthodox. About 15 people applaud him.

Dennis: "Reform does not invite me (because of my politics). Conservative does. I spoke at the Rabbinical Assembly convention."

"My parents went to my Stephen S. Wise minyan Saturday morning for my youngest son's bar mitzvah. They loved it."

Rabbi Korobkin says Dennis Prager thinks more like an Orthodox Jew than most Orthodox Jews.

At the end of the program, a man loudly pleads with Dennis to daven mincha with them. Prager agrees.

...I believe that study can bring many modern Jews closer to God and to Judaism than prayer does. That has been my experience. Therefore, in our services, there is less prayer time and more study time. By study I am referring not to Torah study, but to studying the prayers that we do say (all from the traditional machzor, the High Holy Days prayer book), to the talks I give, and to a two-hour question-and-answer session on Yom Kippur afternoon.

I regularly explain a prayer that the chazzan is just about to recite: What does it mean that “God revives the dead?” If “God loves His people Israel,” why have His people suffered so much? Virtually every paragraph in the machzor offers the leader of the services a chance to speak on a great theme.

...Music, too, brings many of us closer to God and religious feeling than prayer alone. Of course, many prayers are sung by cantors and/or the congregation. And I find the distinctive High Holy Days melodies extraordinarily uplifting. This is especially so with musical instruments. As I noted in a previous Jewish Journal column on musical instruments on Shabbat, God obviously knew the power of musical instruments to bring people closer to Him. He ordained their use in the Holy Temple on Shabbat and holidays. It was the rabbis who forbade their use after the Temple was destroyed.

I well recall the first time I attended a Reform Yom Kippur service — at Stephen S. Wise Temple — and heard the Kol Nidre played on a cello. I had tears in my eyes.

...In our services (pragerhighholidays.net), the goal has been to shorten prayer time, but not necessarily the length of the service. Between listening to beautiful liturgical music sung and played, regular commentaries on the liturgy, and a sermon on a religious or ethical Jewish theme, the percentage of time during which the congregation prays is relatively small. In addition to holding people’s interest, this has another benefit: the prayers we do recite take on added meaning.

Keeping the services interesting and, hopefully, inspiring, has yet another benefit: people come on time.

...The screenwriter and novelist Roger Simon attended our services last year and afterward wrote a column on how the services motivated him to fast for the first time since he was a child.

In order to encourage nonobservant Jews to fast on Yom Kippur, the best thing one can do is figure out how to keep them in shul all day. So this is what we do:

First, we start Yom Kippur services at 11 a.m. This late beginning is enormously helpful. For one thing sleep gives you strength to fast. For another, we reach the afternoon break after only about four hours. Instead of going home, the attendees are then encouraged to stay for an open discussion with me (and sometimes a guest) on any subject except politics for two hours. By the time that ends, we are within about two hours of the fast ending.

In a 2008 lecture on Lev. 19:19-25, Dennis said: "Over time, Jewish law exponentially increased beyond Torah and even rabbinic law, became burdensome, and that's why you had the Sabbatai Zevi phenomenon in the 17th Century. One half of the Jewish people including many of its greatest rabbis believed that a man called Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah. He was a Turkish Jew. It's one of the most interesting religious stories. It's never taught in yeshiva. 

"Jews were so embarrassed by their belief in Sabbatai Zevi that when it ended, it entered the memory hole of Jewish history. I went to yeshiva until 18 and never heard his name. And that included years of study of Jewish history. I learned about it in college. Nobody talks about it because it is so embarrassing. It wasn't a goofy movement."

"Sabbatai Zevi had a motto -- 'the annulling of a commandment is its fulfillment'. He changed a blessing from 'He who frees the bound' to 'He who permits the prohibited.' Two basic statements of his that were anti-law. It was an antinomian movement, which religious Jews bought into. That's my argument that over time, the law did become too burdensome, and when given a theological out, many Jews jumped on that bandwagon."

Dennis wrote in the Jewish Journal Nov. 6, 2013:

Many Orthodox Jews think that observance of halachah, more than faith, is what ensures Jewish survival. Every yeshiva student is taught the famous line from the Midrash: “It would be better that the Jews abandoned Me [God] but kept my commandments.”

But Conservative Judaism provides a nearly perfect refutation of this idea. Many Conservative rabbis in the past, and many today, have led thoroughly halachic lives, virtually indistinguishable from many modern Orthodox rabbis. If halachah is what keeps Jews alive, the Conservative movement should not be in decline — and it should certainly attract more Jews than Reform, the least halachic of the major denominations.

Furthermore, if halachah is the single most important thing to the Orthodox, why has Orthodoxy been so opposed to Conservative Judaism and to Conservative rabbis who have been scrupulously halachic? The answer is that the Conservative movement dropped belief in a God-given Torah. (Jewish Theological Seminary Web site: “The Torah is the foundation text of Judaism ... not because it is divine, but because it is sacred, that is, adopted by the Jewish people as its spiritual font.”) And it is that, not lesser observance of halachah, that is the primary reason for Conservative Judaism’s decline.

Judaism cannot just be a commitment to the Jewish people, love of Israel or even just ritual observance. As important as each is, none will ensure Jewish survival as much as belief — belief in the God of the Torah and in the Torah of God.

On Nov. 18, 2009, Dennis wrote in the Forward:

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite national holiday. In fact, although I am a religious Jew (or rather, because I am a religious Jew), it rivals my favorite Jewish holidays for my affection.

It does so because it is quintessentially American, it is deeply religious without being denominational and it is based entirely on one of the most important, and noble, traits a human being can have — gratitude.

...American Jews should celebrate Thanksgiving with particular enthusiasm.

First, and most obvious, nowhere in Jewish history have we had it is as good for so long as we have had it in America. No individuals or groups have better reason to celebrate Thanksgiving in America than we Jews.

Second, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year in which we Jews celebrate the same religious holiday with the rest of America. By definition, Jews do not share a religion with the non-Jewish majority of Americans. But we do share our God (the God of Creation and the God of Israel) with the Christian majority. And this holiday alone affirms that.

...I recall with pride that in my Orthodox parents’ home on Thanksgiving we ritually washed our hands before the Thanksgiving meal and sang the Birkat Hamazon — the grace after meals — afterward as if it were a yom tov meal.

On Nov. 25, 2013, Dennis said: "The Hebrew calendar simply went wild this year with everything [such as Hanukkah] super duper early."  

The Hebrew calendar wasn't early with its holidays in 2013. Hanukkah began on the 25th of the month of Kislev just like it has for millenia. Hanukkah in 2013 was only "early" if you consider the Western calendar the ultimate real. For one rooted in Torah, the Hebrew calendar is the primary calendar and the Western calendar is just another custom of the Gentiles like hunting, Christmas, and "Have a nice day".

On Nov. 28, 2013, Dennis said: "There are sacrifices you make for your religion. Our religion in America is Americanism... We believe we have a value-system that is God-based that is worthy of living for. I'm not asking you to die for, how about keeping your store closed one day a week [for Thanksgiving]? I come from a tradition that has always said you make sacrifices for your religion. I grew up in a world and still do where you honor the Sabbath. I take pay-cuts for that reason... It hit my bottom line tremendously."

Ten days after his birth, the practical nurse whom we engaged for 2 weeks, Mrs. Lehmann, a refugee from Germany, noticed his penis changing color to blue which, of course, signified a loss of blood flowing to his tiny organ. It seems that the mohel tied the bandage much too tight. We immediately called our pediatrician and fortunately he corrected a very negligent act that occurred at the circumcision.
A much worse and more life-threatening event occurred two days later. Fortunately, Hilda went into the child’s room to check on him and, lo and behold, Dennis’s lips were blue and he was gasping for breath. It seems our nurse was negligent in burping him after he was fed and the milk was closing his small and narrow trachea. Since we had no time to call our regular pediatrician, we called the nearest doctor to our home, Dr. Wollowick, whom we knew from the synagogue and whose office and home was on the next block.
When we informed him of the problem over the phone, he came immediately recognizing the severity of the situation and possible consequences. I remember him driving to our home, parking his car in the middle of the street and running up the stairs to examine our sick child. His next remark completely put us in shock. He stated that only the Police or Fire Dept. Emergency Squad with oxygen could save our son. He called them and in a very short time, the Fire Dept. arrived and placed an adult oxygen mask on our child’s face, not having a mask for an infant. God was good to us at that moment, as He has been to us throughout our lives, saving our newborn son’s life. Dennis immediately began to cry and his lips returned to a normal pinkish color. Kenny, standing outside with his friends kept repeating “That’s my brother.”

The nurse claimed that Dennis was allergic to cow’s milk and had him put on goat’s milk. He lost weight. After a month, he was returned to cow’s milk and thrived, eventually reaching 6’4 and 240 pounds. (Max Prager)
“I imbibed [baby] formula and second-hand smoke,” said Dennis on his radio show Dec. 1, 2010. “That was my diet as a kid. I get sick every other year for about three days.”
Dennis grew up at 2705 Kings Highway in Brooklyn. In 1954, the Pragers moved to 1725 East 27th St. between Quentin Rd. and Avenue R. Dennis and Kenny had their own rooms.
Max and Hilda moved to New Jersey in 1997.

"My parents did not read to me when I was a kid," said Dennis Feb. 13, 2013, "yet I became verbal. The issue is to be around people who speak intelligently and clearly."

In the summer of 1953, when Dennis was five and Kenneth ten, their parents enrolled them at the sleepaway Maple Lake summer camp. 

"I knew from childhood on, stick to the kids who are decent, otherwise you are going to get hurt... From the age of five, I was away from home for eights weeks [every summer]. I didn't like at five, but I also didn't like it at home at five." 

"I went against my gut instinct...when I was ten years old... Four in the bunk formed a group called the Eagles. I knew that one of them was not a nice kid but I decided that I would join because it was better to be with the kids who were powerful. I didn't want to get hurt. It was an insurance policy, like paying protection money to the Mafia. I remember thinking, this is a protection scheme for me. If I join the Eagles, then the Eagles won't hurt me, but I remember thinking, I don't like them, particularly the one. The Eagles were not formed to be nice. That was the last time I befriended a not nice person. I've been fortunate that I have never been hurt by a friend... I have built-in antennae for who to trust. I have perfect pitch." (Sept. 26, 2013)

Max Prager wrote in chapter 26: “What enters my mind now is my father-in-laws reaction to our sending Dennis who was not yet five to a sleep-away camp. On one of our visits we drove up to the camp with Hilda’s parents and when we were ready to leave, Dennis started to cry as he wished to leave with us. Papa Friedfeld then berated us in no uncertain terms telling us how cruel we were to ship off such a young child away from home. We, naturally, were not swayed and poor Dennis remained in exile.”
Max calls Dennis “a poor traveler.” (Chapter 26)
Dennis said on his radio show July 11, 2008: “When I was four years old, I was in a bunk of boys and girls at summer camp. I remember there were girls and boys but it was totally innocent.”
When Dennis was six (according to Dennis) or seven (according to Max), Hilda, who hated housework, left the home to work at Garden Nursing Home. (Max Prager, chapter 27)
Dennis said on his KRLA radio show that he thinks he would’ve been better off if his mother had stayed home instead of going to work when he was young. His early feeling of betrayal by his mother would never leave him, making it difficult for Dennis to trust  and commit to a woman.
His lack of mothering likely accounts for much of Dennis's anxious attachment style, his rebellion against traditional Judaism, his need to be the center of attention, his insatiability for female adoration, a yearning that would cause him to choose the life that would bring him the most women (but usually emotionally avoidant women, making for nightmarish relationships), a yearning that would account for him hiring almost exclusively women to get the nurturing he never got as a child, a yearning that would initiate but also doom his every romance.

Many psychologists note that we obsessively seek in romantic love what we missed out on as a kid from our parents.

On his birthday, Dennis asks on his radio show for people whose lives he has touched to let him know the details. He still yearns for the affirmation he didn't get from his parents.

On Sept. 12, 2013, Dennis was asked by the author of The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, Adrian Rayne: "Did you have loving parents?"

Dennis: "They were not particularly loving... I felt I was in a secure home. I wanted to leave it..."

Feb. 5, 2014, Dennis said: "My parents put each other first. I wouldn't want my mother to love me more than my father."

"When God says it is not good for man to be alone, He does not make a family. He makes one woman. Children do not assuage our existential loneliness, a spouse does."

While Harry Potter was an orphan, Dennis Prager felt like an orphan and couldn't wait to get away from his home.

In his groundbreaking book on sexual addiction called Out of the Shadows, Patrick Carnes wrote:

Addicts report that as children they felt desperately lonely, lost, and unprotected. Not only was there a lack of nurturing, but also there was no one to show them how to take care of themselves or keep them from harm. Not being able to count on, depend upon, the adults in one's life to meet needs is a key element in addiction. As the child matures, there begins a search for that which is dependable -- something that you can trust to make you feel better. Trust and dependency are the issues that determine personal strength and confidence of vulnerability to enslaving addiction. For in the lonely search for something or someone to depend on -- which has already excluded parents -- a child can start to find those things which always comfort, which always feel good, which always are there, and which always do what they promise. For some, alcohol and drugs are the answer. For others it is food. And there is always sex, which usually costs nothing and nobody else can regulate.

Fear of abandonment is the King Kong of issues said therapist Mark E. Smith, "because when someone is under the influence of fear of abandonment, they become irrational and reactive. Typically their spouse have issues around defensiveness. So you have one person reactively driven by irrational jealousies and the other person is really defensive. It can become ugly." 

"One example would be a husband with abandonment issues doesn't get sex when his neediness demanded it, so he pouts and is very sulky for days on end."

On Sept. 11, 2013, Dennis said: "One of the most famous calls in the history of my show was a female doctor who called in and told me with some degree of disgust that a very old man, a patient, was dying and one of the last things he did was to look down her blouse. I said with all respect, I can think of worse ways of dying. I didn't find it as negative a story as the doctor did. It's so important to know the truth about men and women and it is so easy to live in denial."

The key to understanding Dennis Prager lies in his unhappy childhood relationships with his parents, particularly his mother. Those early difficulties with Hilda mirrored his future difficulties with women. From Dennis's struggles with his father, we can understand the rebellious streak that would characterize his public life, his refusal to adhere to any orthodoxy, and his drive to independence and distinction at the cost of community and cooperation. 

Dennis loves the nickname "Dennis the Menace" and this comes from his struggles with his dad. "Dennis the Player" comes from feeling ignored by his mom.

On May 24, 2013, Dennis said: "Aunts and uncles played a terrific role in my life. In my pre-teen years, the happiest moments of my life were going to Miami to visit my aunt and uncle Chippy and Al."

“I don’t recall my dad vacuuming or cooking or making the bed,” said Dennis July 6, 2011. “When a woman is 25 and is imagining her husband, does she imagine him vacuuming?”

Max, who worked as a CPA, wrote in chapter 27:

Since Dennis was now 7 years of age, his mother felt it was time to go to work. She hired a wonderful Negro woman named Ethel who had 3 sons; Dennis adored her and the feeling was mutual. In fact, until his teenage years, she was his confidante through his troublesome period at school…

Because Ashkenazi Jews average IQs rank around 110 while American blacks score around 85, there's little socializing between the groups. Political scientist Robert Weissberg explained "The Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" in a year 2000 talk at the American Renaissance conference:

If you looked around our cultural landscape and tried to find two groups with different values that venerate different things, who worship at different altars, it is hard to find two groups more different than blacks and Jews. Jews are obsessed with education, blacks destroy it. If you've gone to school in the inner city, you know that not only do they hate the idea of learning, but they assault their teachers and physically destroy their schools.

When blacks move into a neighborhood, the first people out are Jews. Jews did not invent white flight but we perfected it. As far as intermarriage and social exchange, there's almost zero. They just don't mix. Jews are not into crime. The sorts of things that blacks specialize in -- muggings, assaults, rapes -- are not a Jewish predilection.

How Jews really relate to blacks is something Jews hardly talked about except when they are amongst themselves. When Jews get together in a safe place and talk about blacks, they will use the term "schvartze." When you go to Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish, he's very careful in what he says. With "schvartze", he becomes tight-lipped. "A black person, a negro." That does not begin to depict what the term means among Jews. There may be a degree of affection, as in, 'I hear Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze.'

It is not necessarily a negative word. It's not the same thing as nigger. If you inserted the word 'nigger' to achieve some lexiconic variety, Jews would be genuinely offended. There can even be a degree of affection in schvartze. As in, 'Ahh, I heard Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze. Oh, how nice.'"

When you use the term 'schvartze', it always implies cognitive inferiority. The mental picture of a stupid black embedded in the term schvartze is true even with pro-civil rights [liberal] Jews... Adding the phrase 'dumb schvartze' is superflous, reserved only used for the most egregious stupidity. Invisible baggage likewise includes gullibility, emotional excitability, and a weakness for here-and-now conspicuous consumption. Violence, especially inter-personal, alcohol-induced mayhem, is also associated with schvartze. The image that comes to the mind with Jews when you say 'schvartze' is simple-minded, impulsive, easily seduced by trinkets. This is extremely close to the traditional Southern image of blacks, almost identical to what many Southerners would privately say about blacks... This is continually reinforced by daily experience, such as in integrated public schools.

We had a procession of cleaning ladies [in New York]. Growing up, I honestly believed that all black people come from a thing called The Agency. We'd hire black cleaning ladies and invariably they'd steal and drink the liquor and my mother would come back and say, 'I'm calling up The Agency and getting another.' Very few Jews of my generation had any other contact. We had a procession of handymen and cleaning people come to my house.

It was always believed that any Jew can ultimately out-smart any schvartze except save being confronted by a demented gunman. Despite immense cultural chasms, Jews held themselves as innately capable of finessing blacks thanks to their superior wits, verbal talent, and a mastery of black psychology. The unmatched success of Jewish ghetto merchants and Jewish civil rights leadership positions proclaim this truth. Even today Jews may secretly brag about their success in beguiling blacks in contentious interpersonal relationships. People sometimes ask me, 'What did you do when they showed up as a demonstration to your office?' This happened to me one time. A bunch of angry young blacks came to my office... I said, 'I just relied on the wisdom of my ancestors. I gave them a little rope-a-dope. I moved around. I said this, I said that. Within half an hour, they were fine. I sold one a suit and several new jewelry and they were happy. They got a deal from Mr. Weissberg.'

Where personal manipulation might fail, the storehouse of survival tactics sufficed exceedingly well. Black pathologies were bearable, especially since most black mayhem was self-inflicted. Jews might even profit from these disorders as merchants or nanny state therapists. Threatened Jews can flee deteriorating neighborhoods, enroll their children in private schools, hire security guards, co-opt black leaders financially, or otherwise escape.

Jews see no conflict between righteously defending black criminals as political prisoners and living in fortress-style buildings.

On the one hand, Jews dread blacks physically. When Jews see blacks walking down the street, they feel tremendous fear. Yet they dutifully pay the danegeld (extortion money).

For most Jews, it is the white goyim who pose the most threat. Contrary fact-based argument fall on deaf ears. Like the schvartzes, the Chinese [and Japanese] are never called goyim.

Blacks are incapable of such well-organized horror [as the Holocaust] unless directed by nefarious whites... A full-scale pogrom is beyond their capacity. Can you imagine blacks systemically rounding up thousands of Jews or even keeping tabs on Jewish neighborhoods? Assess enemies by capabilities, not intentions... The schvartze pose minimal risk. They're too stupid.

I remember Dennis at the age of three sitting next to Gal, Al’s German shepherd twirling the dog’s tail constantly with his mouth wide open. He still hadn’t uttered one word and although Hilda and I weren’t concerned, my father-in-law suggested that we see a “professor” to examine Dennis.

I was preoccupied by human suffering and the problem of evil from a very young age. I’ll give you an example that drove my mother nuts.
I was about five years old and driving my little tricycle around the block in Brooklyn. And only those of you who grew up in New York, I think, experienced the seltzer bottles. They would deliver cases of these bottles.
Down the block lived a young teenager named Lee. While I was driving my tricycle one day, I saw Lee drop by accident the whole box of seltzer bottles and it tore his leg open. It was a trauma for me. I’m sure it wasn’t even a trauma for him. You take some stitches and you’re fine. But all I could do for the next few days was cry about Lee and ask my mother, go over there and tell me how he is until finally it was clear I was driving her nuts.
From later on, whatever it would be, if it was a cartoon, it gave me great gusto to see the good guy beat the bad guy. From the most primal depths of my being, I have wanted the bad to be punished and the good to be rewarded.
I strongly recommend the film Pay it Forward (2000). It’s a very touching movie.
I remember my earliest memories of the Holocaust — watching the 20th Century television series with Walter Cronkite and then I saw Hitler. We were in the living room. I asked my parents, who is this guy? The answer was the to the effect of how bad he was and how he murdered six million Jews and many other people died as a result. It stayed with me. How could someone be that bad? How could innocent people suffer so much?
Unjust suffering has continued to be my preoccupation.

That was my first encounter with massive evil, and I was never again to be the same person. I became obsessed with good and evil — specifically why people engage in evil, and how to fight them.

That obsession has never left me. The only change that occurred did so later, in high school, when I broadened my preoccupation to include why people do good and how to make good people. (I knew from Judaism — and had sensed instinctively — that people are not naturally good.)

That hatred of evil led me, as early as my late teenage years, to hate communism as well as Nazism. And because the Nazis had been vanquished years before I was born, I studied and tried to fight communism. I engaged in the former by doing my graduate work in Communist Affairs at the Russian Institute at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. And I began the fighting part when I was 21: The Israeli government sent me to the Soviet Union to bring Jewish items to Soviet Jews, to learn as much as I could about their situation, and, most important, to bring out names of Jews who wanted to leave and go to Israel.

This preoccupation with good and evil also led me to fall in love with Judaism. I have always regarded Judaism as, more than anything else, preoccupied with goodness. As the Tanakh tells us, “Those who love God must hate evil.” Judaism, almost alone among religions, believes that all of humanity is judged solely by its behavior rather than by its faith.

As it happened, I never found loving God easy (precisely because of how much evil and unjust suffering there is), but hating evil came quite naturally.

That hatred of evil explains nearly every position I take. Perhaps my biggest difference with the left is over this issue. Whereas I believe we humans should be preoccupied with combating evil (and I believe God, the Bible and Judaism want that as well), the left, from its inception until this moment, has been preoccupied with combating something else: material inequality.

I have never regarded material inequality — unless arrived at immorally, as it is in much of the Third World — as evil. Regarding people’s material status, two things should disturb us: a lack of opportunity to improve one’s material well-being and a poverty that is so bad that it deprives people of all dignity and hope. Neither condition has been prevalent in American life in my lifetime. On the contrary, America has been the greatest opportunity-giving society ever created.

More than that, I came to realize that I was living in the very country that had best figured out how to make a better world. But it was not until midlife that I came to understand the specific values that lay at the basis of this magnificent American achievement.

My friend Dennis Prager told me that when he was six years old, the first words he learned to read in English were “pure vegetable shortening only.” He added, “It was good training to learn at the age of six that I couldn’t have every candy bar in the candy store.”

After all, it wasn’t too long ago that for most products one determined if they were kosher by looking at the ingredients. Yet the consensus today in the United States, even among the Modern Orthodox, is that a product cannot be kosher without rabbinical supervision (and the supervision itself has to be regarded as reputable). Kosher consumers are now told by the various kashrut organizations that canned vegetables, which contain only vegetables and water, need supervision, not to mention mouthwash, tin foil pans, and a host of other items. They are further told that some fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries and broccoli, can’t be eaten at all, or at least not without a cleaning regimen (complete with liquid soap) that would discourage most.

On his radio show Dec. 6, 2011, Dennis said: "When I think of my elementary school life vis-a-vis girls, I would be arrested today. Maybe this is telling too much... I remember in kindergarten we had a big flight of stairs from the lunch room to the classroom. I would walk behind the girls because they wore skirts. I was five years old. Today I would be arrested for leering. And it was so innocent. It was the innocence of what's there?"

On his show Feb. 25, 2013, Dennis said: "Showing violence does not rob children of innocence. Children know that there is violence from the earliest age. Showing sex does take away their innocence. Innocence has to do with sexuality.

"Anyone raised with fairy tales knows violence. Anyone who's read the violence knows violence. Anyone who's watched cartoons knows violence."

"There is violence that helps keep kids innocent -- violence against the bad guy. When children see bad guys punished or killed if they're about to kill good people, that's what kids worry about. They don't freak out that bad guys get killed. They worry that innocent people get killed. That's me. I'm innocent."

Said Dennis Mar. 28, 2012: "I am certain that my school would've asked to medicate me under the same rules we have today. And I don't know that I'd be the same person I am today if I had been medicated."

"You couldn't get me to read in elementary school if you bribed me. I'd do anything but read a book. I'd shovel snow. I wasn't a good student. I'd pick up a book and my mind would wander after two paragraphs."

Dennis went to first grade at Yeshiva Rambam. “I disliked school from then until I left graduate school 18 years later,” Prager wrote in his autobiography on CD (available on Dennisprager.com since 1998).
“I went to a religious school. There was no bullying.” (March 11, 2011)
“I was voted president of my class from first grade to the end of high school,” said Dennis in a 2005 lecture on Deut. 30. “What did I have in first grade? I just got up. Three kids would walk outside the door and I was elected every year. I have a presence. I did nothing for that.”
Aug. 31, 2011, Dennis said: “During recess, the teachers would stand around one corner of the playground talking to each other while smoking cigarettes while we would play catching the girls and putting them in jail. It was the high point of my education career. I lived for that. [That was the raison detre of school -- recess. 12/10/13]]
“And we would play chicken fights. You’d put a guy on your shoulders against the other guy with a guy on his shoulders and you have to throw him down. I was the designated horse. Aaron Kirschenbaum was the guy on my shoulders. If a kid got hurt, you went to the nurse. If you got really hurt, you went to the hospital.”

Dec. 10, 2013, Dennis said: "I wouldn't have made it through elementary school [today]. I would've been drugged because I was always fidgeting and talking in class. I would've been given some ADD drug... And I would have been kicked out because I flirted with the girls a lot."

Max Prager wrote in chapter 27:

In this same year, 1954, Dennis started his academic career, starting in the first grade at Yeshiva Rambam. Also, although we were satisfied with our sons’ summer camp the previous year at Maple Lake, we decided to give Shelly Apfelbaum a break by enrolling both our boys at his Camp Winsoki near Renssellaerville in the Catskills.
…Kenny went there through the usual program; camper, waiter and counselor finishing his camping career as life guard; Dennis was a camper. When he arrived at the age of being a counselor, he opted to go to Camp Massad in the Poconos in Pa.

When I was a 7-year-old boy, I flew alone from New York to my aunt and uncle in Miami and did the same thing coming back to New York. I boarded the plane on my own and got off the plane on my own. No papers for my parents to fill out. No extra fee to pay the airline. I was responsible for myself…
["My parents got there late [in New York]. Instead of waiting at the gate, I went to get my luggage. My parents tell the story that when they finally arrived, I had gotten my luggage and I was tipping the porter. Since the earliest age, I've wanted to be my own man." Aug. 31, 2012]
When I was a boy, I ran after girls during recess, played dodgeball, climbed monkey bars and sat on seesaws. Today, more and more schools have no recess; have canceled dodgeball lest someone feel bad about being removed from the game; and call the police in to interrogate, even sometimes arrest, elementary school boys who playfully touch a girl. And monkey bars and seesaws are largely gone, for fear of lawsuits should a child be injured.
When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day…
When I was a boy, we had in our lives adults who took pride in being adults. To distinguish them from our peers, we called these adults “Mr.,” “Mrs.” and “Miss,” or by their titles, “Doctor,” “Pastor,” “Rabbi,” “Father.”…
When I was a teenage boy, getting to kiss a girl, let alone to touch her thigh or her breast (even over her clothes) was the thrill of a lifetime. Most of us could only dream of a day later on in life when oral sex would take place (a term most of us had never heard of). But of course, we were not raised by educators or parents who believed that “teenagers will have sex no matter what.” Most of us rarely if ever saw a naked female in photos (the “dirty pictures” we got a chance to look at never showed “everything”), let alone in movies or in real life. We were, in short, allowed to be relatively innocent. And even without sex education and condom placement classes, few of us ever got a girl pregnant….
When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the doctor and travel on airplanes.

On Xmas day, Kenny and Dennis would go with us to the Home to speak to the patients and bring the Holiday spirit to their forlorn lives. The boys would take movies and still photographs and then show them the next year. I can still hear them exclaim when viewing the movies, “Paul is no longer with us; what a pity;” ”Look how nice Mary looked last year, too bad she died.”

On his radio show April 12, 2010, Dennis said: “One of my favorite things in life, since I was always an amateur photographer, in high school, I would go every Christmas to the nursing home to take photos of the patients. I remember having to adjust my psyche because the next Christmas I would show slides of last year and I will never forget, the patients would say, ‘Oh, there’s Jerry. He died in April. Oh, there’s June. She died in August.’ It was almost like, ‘There’s Jerry. He went to the Yankee game.’”
In his 22nd lecture on Deuteronomy (March 2004), Dennis said: “I’ve been into photography since I was ten years old. My father used to drive me on Sundays to the John F. Kennedy airport in Queens and I would photograph airplanes (because I dreamed of going to foreign countries) with my Kodak box camera.”

“I grew up in a strict home. My mother did not allow me to have comic books. During summer camp, I’d read an entire year’s worth of comic books. But I knew that the Prager home had an elevated standard of literature. It was annoying but I am a better person for having grown up in a home that says this home has good literature and not comic books.” (Aug. 26, 2011) 

Dennis wrote: “I vividly recall the moment when, as a boy in sixth grade, I heard the news that Caryl Chessman was executed. Because Chessman was executed for rape, the notion that rape is a horror stayed with me almost all of my life.” (The Prager Perspective, June 15, 1997)
In a 1992 lecture on Genesis 16-17, Dennis said: “I remember as a kid in yeshiva. You learn Genesis first when you are a child in Jewish school. I remember learning this [Sarai's plan to have a child through Haggah] and thinking, ‘Wow, you can have another wife! It wasn’t even another wife. They brought him a woman?’
“I learned it in fairly innocent times. I hadn’t yet fully eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, but I do remember thinking, ‘Wow, those were better times!’
“I remember thinking that those men in those times had a better life! What a deal! And it was my patriarch Abraham who was not a big sinner. What a thing they had!”
Dennis Prager would grow up to have sex with a lot of women — many of them met through lecturing on Torah — and to marry three of them.

As a child, Dennis was impressed by the way his father regularly called his mother (Dennis's grandmother), even though she was a difficult woman.
“Her toughness strongly contributed to neither of her daughters marrying…and to other problems.
“After she was widowed in 1950, my father took it upon himself to see her every week and to call her every day…
“I vividly recall a nearly nightly ritual. After dinner, my father would call his mother, only to have her yell at him. My father possesses a particularly strong disposition, yet he found these telephone conversations so disconcerting that he would put the phone down on the kitchen table. I would hear the yelling, and watch my father periodically pick up the phone and say, ‘Yeah, ma.’” (Think a Second Time, pg. 47)
“My parents virtually never argued, but on the rare occasions they did, I felt worse than when they were arguing with me. In my home, if one parent said X, it didn’t help to go to the other. In fact, they got annoyed. So what you have to do as a kid is to pick the parents who will give the answer you want. In general, one should do that. Ask people whose answer you want. In Jewish life we were told, go to the rabbi who you think will be most lenient when you want to know if something is permitted.” (Apr. 13, 2010)

Said Dennis in his tenth lecture on Deuteronomy in 2003: “I’m not saying I succeeded with my kids. I didn’t. If I could’ve succeeded, I would’ve gotten them to memorize as much as possible. I remember my teachers tried to make me memorize and I thought it was the stupidest thing. ‘What am I, a parrot?’ That’s the way I would respond. My teachers didn’t have great affection for me, with good reason. I thought it was absurd and yet everything that I have ever memorized, I am thrilled I memorized. It is painful to me that I didn’t memorize more.”

Dennis did not enjoy the circus. "The Lady Gagas of my childhood were in the circus. The tattooed lady. I went as a kid [at age seven] to the Ringley Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. It was called the sideshow. I was not excited to go. Putting people up to be exhibited like animals, freaks, it was called the Freak Show, because the deepest part of me has been to never humiliate people.

"I got no joy out of getting scared that somebody might kill themselves or get hurt. When people walk on the tightrope or fly in the sky, all I'm doing is sitting there worrying. What if they miss the other person's arms? What if they fall from the high wire?

"I didn't find the clowns funny." (Dec. 19, 2013)

Dennis said he followed sports as much as other kids his age (knowing batting averages and ERAs, etc 8/6/13), attending New York Ranger hockey games in the cheap seats every Sunday night during high school (5/23/12). When fights broke out on the ice, Dennis stayed seated to show his disapproval.
The Dodgers baseball team left Brooklyn in 1958 and moved to Los Angeles. Dennis was nine years old. “The Dodgers leaving Brooklyn measured on my Richter scale .000001,” said Dennis. “On my older brother’s Richter scale, it is still registering. It was an earthquake.”
Dennis is not a sports fan. He will root for a team but his happiness is not wrapped up in its success. “You’re not a real fan,” Dennis’s radio show producer Allen Estrin told him on air.
“These things have no rhyme or reason,” Dennis said, explaining his affection for the Los Angeles Angels. (April 2, 2010)
“My father took me to two ballgames and once to the Hayden planetarium in New York. That was it. This is not an indictment of him. That was utterly typical of fathers of that generation. This was not something that was expected. The trip to the planetarium was less successful because as soon as the stars came out, he fell asleep.”
“My grandfather never took my father anywhere. If you had said to my grandfather who came over from Russia, ‘Nu, did you take Mendel to the ballgame?’ He wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. You don’t take kids anywhere. You provided room and board and you were lucky if the anti-Semites didn’t have a pogrom.” (March 24, 2008 at Nessah Synagogue)
On his show Sept. 28, 2012, Dennis said: "I had two aunts who never had children. I had one aunt who just loved my brother and I up. She took me to more places than my parents did, which wasn't keen competition. My other aunt who married late also took me to more places than my parents. Both of these aunts desperately wanted children and so the nephew in this case was showered with love."

“When I was a kid, there was a television character named Bret Maverick. I must’ve been eleven years old. I would watch it every other Sunday. I said, I want to be Bret Maverick.” (Radio show, Dec. 3, 2008)
Dennis never spanked his kids. He later concluded that was a mistake. “I was corporally punished [by my parents] but it was only done once and it was done wrong. And that’s part of the reason I came out against it. I was yelled at and I couldn’t stand that either. I was a good kid. …I was hit by teachers. Every time a teacher hit me, they were right. I knew they were right. It’s a lot easier to be corporally punished by a teacher than by a parent. You don’t expect your teacher to love you.” (Oct. 27, 2009)
“As a kid, I did not want to go to school. The happiest days of my elementary school life were when at night, it started to snow and I would look out the window and I had one prayer — that it sticks. If it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t matter how much it snows, the school bus will pick me up because they can get through slush but they can’t get through a serious snow fall that sticks.” (Oct. 22, 2010)
On his show June 3, 2011, Dennis said: "I very rarely had a nickname.
"During recess in elementary school, we used to play a game called punch ball. You’d punch a rubber ball and you’d run to first, second, third or home. It was you against everyone else."
In a dialogue with Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012, Dennis said: "I never learned to ride a bike. My parents gave up on me when I fell off the tricycle."
Adam: "Wow. It was the worst 19th birthday that Dennis's parents..."
Dennis: "I finally learned to ride a bike about ten years ago. It's sickening to me that it took so long. That was not one of my gifts."

On his show April 15, 2011, Dennis said: “I could write a description of my life and you would say, ‘Wow, that guy is a victim.’ And I am the last person in the world who walks around with a victim mentality.”
On his show April 20, 2012, Dennis said: "Why did they drop diagramming sentences? Do you know how much I learned? One of the reasons I speak well and write well is because I learned to diagram sentences in fifth grade. Here's an adverb. Here's an adjective. This modifies the noun."
At age eleven, Dennis spent the sixth grade at Manhattan’s rigorous Rabbi Jacob Joseph School (R.J.J.S.), whose hours ran from 8-6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 8-1 p.m., Fridays and Sundays.
Max Prager wrote in chapter 30:

Every morning, including Sundays, I would drive him to the subway station on Kings Highway and McDonald Ave. Lo and behold, after a few weeks at his new school, phone calls would be made to my office by Rabbi Schwartz advising me of his behavior. I really was in a dilemma as to what action to take. When Dennis informed me several months later that students had been beaten by young hoodlums in that area, I decided to reenroll him in Rambam at the end of the year.

This is one of the pet horror stories of my childhood.
My father would come in my room every week and see that the turtle hadn’t moved. The lettuce is still there. “Dennis, he’s dead.”
“Dad, I don’t think he’s dead. They just don’t do much.”
“Dennis, he’s dead. We don’t need a dead turtle in the house.”
“Dad, dad, that’s the way turtles are.”
“Dennis, he’s dead.”
All right. I believed my dad. I flushed him down the toilet and then he started crawling.
Every pet we had came to an [unfortunate end].
As the flushing started, no, he didn’t get out. He can’t escape a flush. It’s a terrible story.
Then we had a bird. My father looked at the bird and said, “I feel sorry for him. We should let him fly.”
“Dad, dad, you can’t let him out of the cage.”
“Let him fly! The animal is suffering.”
“Dad, I’m telling you, these birds, it’s not a good idea.”
“Dennis, it’s not right the way we are treating him.”
“OK, dad.”
So we let the bird. He sees a mirror. He flies to the other bird. He cracks his skull. Dead bird.
We had another one. Something tragic happened.

On his radio show Dec. 6, 2010, Dennis Prager said that he inherited two tortoises when he married Sue (his third marriage). “One day, we saw that one of the tortoises was very lethargic. He had something hanging out from the back of him. My wife tried to nurse him and to medicate him. He was going to die. It turns out, his penis stuck out and wasn’t going back. It would’ve gangrened and he would’ve died. There was a veterinarian in Santa Monica who knew how to treat a gangrenous tortoise penis but it was a lot of money.”
During his public dialogue with Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012, Dennis said the tortoise penis repair cost just under $2,000 and that his home spends more on the dog than on his wife's clothes.

Dennis said Dec. 8, 2010: “When I was a kid, I was taken to an allergist [because of a cough] who gave me scratch tests. I was allergic according to the allergist to 32 different things including milk and rabbits. I never took these things as holy grail. I remember thinking when told I am allergic to milk, if this doctor thinks I am abstaining from cold cereal and ice cream, he’s out of his mind. It turns out I am allergic to one thing only — cats. I just stop breathing.”
On his show Jan. 27, 2011, Dennis said: “Do you know what I had in my childhood that doesn’t exist today? My mother would give her 30 cents and I would buy her Kent cigarettes. I’d be ten years old and I’d walk to the candy store. I loved those stores.”
“She stopped smoking in her fifties.”

Social Capital

On his show April 6, 2011, Dennis said: “I’ll never forget when I was a kid [nine years old]. There was a man who was a high school math teacher, Mr. Joe Salts. What a sweet man. A member of the synagogue. He was hit by a hit-and-run driver on the West Side highway. He was blinded. The synagogue took care of this man for the rest of his life.
“The impact it made on me watching my father have people over to the house to see how much will you give, how much will you give. I have tears in my eyes. But as the state gets bigger, he just applies at some agency and has a bureaucrat take down the details.”
“Here’s another victim of the big state in terms of goodness because they say, why should I take care of my neighbor? The government will.
“This man blinded in the auto accident. The man was a member of the synagogue. The biggest thing DeTocqueville noted was how many free associations Americans made. Because the government was weak, people had strong civil society.
“I remember being a member of the Simi Valley Rotary Club. It was all men. They would get together every week. These guys, almost none of whom were wealthy, they were hard-working middle class. And you know what they devoted every meeting to? What charity they would engage in. But as government takes over more and more of charitable work, what need do you have for these charities? But we need people to join societies. The bigger the government, the more atomized the society.”

On his show Feb. 6, 2012, Dennis said he is the only person he knows who was a member of Rotary. "I have the values of guys who drink mass-market domestic beer."

In a lecture on Leviticus 16, Dennis said: "We today have retreated further than ever from a sense of collective responsibility. The most obvious example is kids. Kids used to be raised by every adult on the block. If I acted out in front of any adult who didn't even know who the hell I was, he would say something.  'Hey kid, you don't talk like that.' If I had cursed at the local candy store in Brooklyn, some adult would've said, 'Hey kid, we don't talk like that.' Today kids curse freely in line in front of you and you even fear reproving them. We fear that they might hurt you. And we fear what the parent might say. 'It's none of your business. I'll raise my kid.' The sense that the collective is responsible is a Torah idea."

It is also an idea that exists primarily in non-diverse communities. Dennis grew up in a non-diverse Torah community of high-IQ Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews. He had no friends who were not Orthodox Jews. From this perspective, diversity can seem vibrant, but you're not often going to find parents of different races taking responsibility for the other race's children (outside of traditional religion). You're not going to find parents of different races cooperating to build something in the community and to form neighborhood watches. 

The kind of close-knit community Prager advocates is in inverse proportion to racial diversity noted leftist Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who was so upset by the results of his study that he didn't publish it for a decade and only then with a pro-diversity spin. Putnam found that Los Angeles, the most racially diverse of America's cities, had the least trust, meaning that people in such a racially mixed community tend to pull their heads in, go out less, cooperate less, and watch more TV. By contrast, the whitest cities such as Portland have the most neighborliness.

Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones...

Putnam’s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicago’s Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley’s administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.

This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it’s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don’t speak the same language as you. Then there’s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work—namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like.

The high crime rate didn’t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.

Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war. Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn’t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn’t be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.

In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade...

But what primarily drove down L.A.’s rating in Putnam’s 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.’s whites said they trusted other races “only a little or not at all,” 37 percent of L.A.’s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.

I repeatedly quote Sailer at length in this biography of Dennis Prager because he has the guts to tell the truth in many areas where Dennis does not.

Psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, another giant persecuted for telling unpopular truths that Prager would never touch, said:

The more ethnically diverse a country, the more warfare and tensions and uncooperation. The more ethnically homogenous a country is, the more cooperation...

Many social psychological studies show that altruism increases with the benefactor’s actual or perceived similarity to the beneficiary." (Race, Evolution and Behavior, pg.81)

Many studies have found that people are more likely to help members of their own race or country than they are to help members of other races or foreigners, and that antagonism between classes and nations may be greater when a racial element is involved.

Direct analogies have been drawn between the way monkeys and apes resent and repel intruding strangers of the same species and the way children attack another child who is perceived as being an outsider... (pg. 85)

Groups made up of people who are genetically predisposed toward such moral behaviors as honesty, trust, temperence, willingness to share, loyalty, and self-sacrifice will have a distinct genetic advantage over groups that do not. (pg. 89)

A 2005 news article reported: 

"Likeness leads to liking," said the study's author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. "People have a need to identify and be with others like themselves ('their own kind'). It is a powerful force in human affairs."

Rushton anchored the human preference for similarity in the evolutionary psychology of altruism, which suggests that favoritism toward kin and similar others evolved to help replicate shared genes. In-group loyalty is almost always seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty. This explains why ethnic remarks are so easily taken as "fighting words."

The paper described the group-identification processes as innate--part of the evolved machinery of the human mind. Even very young children make in-group/out-group distinctions about race and ethnicity in the absence of social learning.

Sociologist Linda S. Gottfredson wrote: "Humans are not promiscuous altruists, of course, but favor persons genetically similar to themselves."

Psychologist Richard Lynn said in 1989: "Racial and ethnic conflict is occurring throughout the world—between Blacks and Whites in the United States, South Africa, and Britain; Basques and Spaniards in Spain; and Irish and British in Northern Ireland. These conflicts have defied explanations by the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and economics.... genetic similarity theory represents a major advance in the understanding of these conflicts." (pg. 534)

Dennis Prager wrote Dec. 18, 2013 in the Jewish Journal:

I don’t think that Jewish neighborhoods are always a good thing for Jews or, for that matter, for our fellow Americans who are not Jewish. In fact, committed Jews living among non-Jews often does more good — for Jews, for Judaism, for Kiddush HaShem and for relations with non-Jews.

Having lived much of my life in Jewish neighborhoods, I think I am well acquainted with the arguments for many Jews living in one area of a city.

...And for Orthodox Jews, there is simply no choice. If you don’t live within walking distance of a synagogue, you simply cannot attend a synagogue on Shabbat or any of the other Torah holy days. And you will be very lonely on Shabbat, as there will be no one with whom to share Shabbat meals...

But there are also powerful arguments against Jews congregating in one area.

One argument is that Jews (and any other ethnic group) often become better people when they live among those who are not members of their ethnic/religious group.

Most people grow — intellectually and morally — when they have to confront outsiders. There are, of course, wonderful people who never leave their communities. But they are the exception. Most people do not grow when they lead insular lives.

In my travels through the 50 states, my favorite Jews have disproportionately been those who live in small Jewish communities.

Having grown up an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn — having only Orthodox Jewish friends, and having attended Orthodox schools and Orthodox summer camps through high school — I know what insular ethnic/religious life is like. And I didn’t find it healthy. Among many other reasons, the non-Jew (and even the non-Orthodox Jew) wasn’t real.

I first seriously encountered Jewish alternatives to my insular upbringing in my early 20s, when I drove from New York to Texas with my dear friend Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. Thanks to the “Jewish Traveler’s Guide,” we found the name of a Jewish doctor in Alexandria, La., who listed himself as providing a place for Jewish travelers in central Louisiana to have Shabbat meals and kosher food...

...It can’t be a coincidence that virtually every great Jewish religious work was composed outside of Israel, when Jews lived among non-Jews. We have, for example, two versions of the Talmud — the Babylonian and the Jerusalem. And it is the former that we study. Maimonides’ works were all written outside of Israel, sometimes in Arabic.

...My wife and I live in a non-Jewish suburb of Los Angeles — so non-Jewish that it doesn’t even have a Chabad House. The closest Chabad House, in Glendale (not a major Jewish metropolis either), is run by the inimitable Rabbi Simcha Backman. He has “appointed” me an honorary shaliach (Chabad emissary) in La Canada.

I think I build the only sukkah there, and when we opened our home one Sukkot, I recall the wide eyes of all the children of Jewish parents who had never seen a sukkah in their lives. Introducing Jews who have had little or no contact with Jewish life to Judaism is another mitzvah that a committed Jew living outside a Jewish neighborhood can engage in.

I live in a cul-de-sac, and my immediate neighbors are an Arab-American couple, whom my wife and I adore. The other neighbor is Korean. My cul-de-sac is what America is supposed to be about. It’s still a good idea.

Jan. 2, 2014, Dennis said: "I don't like any ethnic neighborhood. I don't think it's the American ideal."

"I don't think black neighborhoods are healthy for blacks. I don't think Mexican neighborhoods are healthy for Mexicans. They're comfortable."

Feb. 13, 2014, Dennis said: "A lot of people feel more comfortable with one of their own, unfortunately, racially, ethnically, whatever, I understand that, but that's where the mind must conquer feelings, particularly if you are religious. Religion must conquer all other feelings or else religion is crap. Either we are all God's children irrespective of our race or we are not."

"That you feel more comfortable with people who look like you may well be your human response but it should not be your God-centered response... If religion doesn't teach us values, it is utterly worthless... Values should always trump feelings." 

"If you see another person, you should see another one of God's children [first]. You shouldn't see a white or a black."

"If you oppose interracial marriage and you are a religious Christian or a religious Jew, then you are not religious. You are convenient. You're comfortable with your culture. If people state I want my children to marry someone of my faith, I understand that. I want my children to marry somebody who is conservative politically. I understand values-based desires for your children. I don't understand race-based."

"Doesn't love trump race?"

"I didn't expect this [stand for pro-interracial marriage] to be controversial. I expected to do one segment and move on."

"This notion about we want to preserve the culture. That's a very dangerous idea that race and culture are identical. Race is race and culture is culture. What culture does a black atheist and a black evangelical share? Recipes?"

"Either we believe we are all God's children and character matters infinitely more than skin color or we don't."

Jan. 10, 2014, Dennis said: "Crime causes poverty... Crime is the greatest predictor of poverty. There is no commerce where there is crime. People stay home for fear of being hurt. People don't build if they think they will be hurt violently."

And what is the great predictor of crime in a neighborhood? The presence of blacks (and to a lesser degree, latinos). As James Q. Wilson noted: "Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men. This disparity is not new; it has existed for well over a century."

Multi-cultural societies tend to be less creative, noted blogger Jim Kalb:

High-level creativity needs a coherent setting and tradition to give it materials and possibilities. That’s why there is no Shakespeare of pidgin. As Sailer points out, ethnic cuisines developed in monocultural settings.

In multicultural society the only principles of order are arm’s length contract and top-down management. There’s not enough of a network of ties and common understandings for anything else to work. Neither allows for much creativity, because they’re too simple and single-minded.

...[I]f you have a multicultural society that has to pretend to be free, equal and democratic you have to control thought and expression in boring ways to keep the whole house of cards from collapsing. “Celebrating diversity” means refusal to deal with any important issue in an interesting way, because you might end up saying that something is better than something else.

Steve Sailer wrote:

Periclean Athens wasn't as cosmopolitan as Alexandria or Rome, and Fourteenth Century Florence was full of Italians but not much else, and so forth. Right now, America is more diverse than ever, but it sure doesn't seem as creative as it was for most of the 20th Century...

Why go through the hard word of creating when you can just borrow? Necessity is the mother of invention, and diversity reduces the necessity of inventing your own amusements. 

Consider racially homogenous Liverpool, England in the early 1960s. Some Liverpudlian youth loved this new-fangled rock 'n' roll music invented in the Mississippi River Valley in the 1950s. If there had been an African-American community in Liverpool, the white kids would have employed the black Americans to play music for them to dance to. But there weren't any African-Americans in Liverpool, so the white kids had to make their own.

Bar Mitzvah

Ethnic pride and racial thinking has never been big for Dennis. At his Bar Mitzvah (he recited the Torah portions of Mattos and Masei at the end of the book of Numbers) at Camp Winsoki on July 15, 1961, he received the book Great Jews in Sports. He found the topic hilarious.
“I didn’t want to be childlike when I was a child.” (Feb. 28, 2011) 

Jan. 22, 2014, Dennis said: "An 18-year old is a role model to a 13-year old. Just remember when you were 13 how you might have looked up to an older brother or older kids. I lived catty corner from a high school when I grew up in Brooklyn. I remember when I would walk home from the bus stop and the high school kids were walking the other way. Those kids were so old. I watched everything they did, every way they behaved. We boys are wild. We watch how older males act. We have no other way of knowing how to act."

(Picture of Dennis’s family at his bar mitzvah. Dennis with his parents and brother. Dennis in his late teens.)
Max Prager wrote in chapter 31:

Dennis became a Bar Mitzva in August 1961 while he was a camper at Winsocki. Hilda and I, after getting Dennis’s permission, decided to celebrate at camp. Believe it or not, this was the first of four events which were held to commemorate our son’s becoming a “man”.
Unfortunately for Dennis, the portions of the Torah to be read that Shabbat – Matoth and Masse – were the longest in words of the entire Pentateuch and making it obligatory to read both because that year was a leap year in the Hebrew calendar. Despite this difficult task, Dennis’s rendition was excellent in both the pronunciation of the words and the cantillation; his reading of the Haftorah, similarly, was perfect.
Since we were members of two synagogues and Dennis was our last son to be honored in this mitzvah, we felt we could not get enough of celebrating. Consequently, upon his return from camp and after the High Holy Days in October, Dennis again obliged us by consenting to read from the Torah and chant the Haftorahs in Kingsway Jewish Center and Cong. Oheb Zedek. We invited the entire congregations to a large kiddish since all our friends were not invited to the camp festivities.
In November, we held the Bar Mitzva Reception on a Saturday evening at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan inviting our families and close friends.

Prager came early to the belief that his life mission was to promote goodness. “When people got hurt, I cried – and still do; it’s as simple as that. I am doing today exactly what I wanted to be doing when I was five: fighting bad people.
“My wife says that I was born mature… I had thought differently early on and always in terms of good and evil. When kids got bullied at school, it bugged me. If an ugly girl was seated on the side in a dance, it bothered me. And I would go over and talk even though I was dying to be with the pretty girls. I can’t stand cruelty. I have a visceral reaction against it.” (C-SPAN Booknotes)
“When he’d go to New York,” remembers Hilda, “and he’d see a man selling pencils, he’d turn to us and say, ‘I wish that I could buy all his pencils so that he wouldn’t have to beg for money.’” (CD)

At age 11, Harry Potter discovered he was a wizard living among ordinary people. I imagine the young Dennis Prager felt similarly. 

In a 2006 lecture, Tom Wolfe said: "Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world - so ordained by some almighty force - would make not that individual but his group...the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles."

With a yearning to promote God and goodness, Dennis stumbled upon an endeavor where if everybody competed, Jews will always win because they brought the idea of God into the world and they also developed the best moral code (Torah). As historian Paul Johnson wrote: "Judaism has the most sophisticated system of moral theology, or ethics, of any world religion."

In a 2008 lecture on Lev. 19:9-11, Dennis said: "The Torah is preoccupied with the issue of not humiliating people and I caught it by osmosis. If there were five things drummed into me in yeshiva, not to humiliate people and to protect their dignity was one of them. And I am not alone. I might have had a more sensitive disposition in that arena, but even the less inclined in that area were also influenced. The humor we had at yeshiva was not of tearing down of others. To this day I'm shocked that a lot of the humor we have in society today is tearing down people. I recoil. The yeshiva boy in me does not get why that is funny... The humor we had was in good taste. It was just real powerful ribbing."
“I had an admiration for Batman,” said Prager on his radio show June 16, 2006, “because he did not have superpower. I think I liked Green Lantern because nobody read him. I felt sorry for him. And then there was Wonderwoman who visually had a provocative effect on this 13-year old.”
On his radio show June 10, 2010, Dennis said: “Whenever you get somebody at the airline after pressing 11 different numbers, do you imagine how the person looks? I do only with women. I don’t care how the guy looks. I imagine that every woman taking my reservation is Miss Arizona.”
“The normal male will go into a living room, spread his buttocks and toot. There’s an act of self-suppression that each of us engages in not to do that… Men have to be manufactured or we stay boys forever.”
Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on Leviticus 19: “The humor that we had at yeshiva was not the type of tear-down-others. The yeshiva boy in me does not get why it is funny to make fun of people. I don’t mean ribbing.”

Nuclear War

On his show Mar. 24, 2012, Dennis said: "Did I ever think during the Cold War that a hot war was inevitable? Never. Not for a day. I was young during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I had zero fear."
"I remember we had exercises in school to protect us in case of a nuclear attack and I remember laughing myself silly when I would be told to go under the desk now. I thought, 'You've got to be kidding. There's going to be a nuclear attack on New York and my desk will protect me? There were some people who built fall-out shelters. I thought they were eccentric."
"I never worried for a day because mutual assured destruction works with people who enjoy life and the communist leaders enjoyed life. They had periodic orgies. They drank themselves silly. They had gorgeous homes called dachas on riverbanks. These people didn't want to die."
"I do fear a war from an Islamic country [because they don't fear dying]."
"I fear ascetics more than I fear hedonists."
"I fear nuclear war today."

Guns

On May 30, 2013, Dennis said: "I played with water guns and toy guns [as a child]. I'd stand in front of the mirror and draw against myself like a cowboy and see who won each time. I actually thought I could beat the mirror if I went fast enough. I would never have confused a toy with a real gun."

"I was witness at age 24 when I lived in Queens to a bank robbery. Joseph Telushkin and I were the last two people to leave a bank as guys in ski masks came in. I thought it was odd. It was a Spring day. I heard, 'OK, everybody, hands up.'

"The FBI came to my apartment and brought real guns and I was shaking. I had never touched a real gun. I had never seen a real gun."

On his radio show April 16, 2012, Dennis Prager said: “The Secret Service has a wonderful reputation for protecting the president and going after counterfeiters… I think every high school kid, if they read, picks a crime that fascinates them. For most, it’s murder. Not for me. I read book after book about counterfeiters.” “My wife was into crime. She definitely read the crime books, the murder books. She still is.”

Problems At School

The proverbial “Why?” child, Prager was sent to the principal’s office so often that they named a chair “The Dennis Prager seat.”
“If I had the sense of parenting that I have today,” said Max, “I could’ve spared myself an awful lot of anguish because in most cases Dennis was right.” (CD)
Max said he’s a perfectionist, and that he was too tough on his kids. He said that as he ages, he becomes milder and more accepting.
“Dennis’s behavior in school was horrible,” said Max. “He was extremely bright and found school boring. I should’ve been more accepting and forgiving. He went to four elementary schools.
“Dennis always knew what he wanted. And this is difficult for parents who usually want to discipline or guide the child. He was always respectful, but Dennis always did things his way.” (Dennis Prager’s CD ROM released in 1998)
Dennis: “I talked in class… Took the girls’ briefcases without permission and passed them around my room.
“I didn’t feel secure enough at home to act out, so I did my acting out at school.” (CD)

On March 17, 2013, Dennis said to Hugh Hewitt: "I said, 'Rabbi, what happens in Olam Haba (the next world)?' I was dead serious. I wanted to know, much more than what the Chief Priest wore. He said, 'We spend eternity studying Torah.' I was traumatized because I thought of being in this man's class forever. I remember thinking, 'What happens in the alternative?'"

On April 16, 2010, Dennis said: “I used to think I was bullied by the teachers because I was thrown out of class on a very regular basis. And I would go home and if my parents found out about it, and that was the only thing I worried about, I said, ‘They pick on me because I am the tallest kid in the class’, which is a non-sequitar, but that’s what I believed, ‘I just stick out because I’m so big’. The truth is, they threw me out because I was the most disruptive and my parents knew that and they didn’t let me believe that nonsense and it was a great cure in my life.”
Hilda: “He was a rough guy in school. He’d read The New York Times [in class] and do other things that he shouldn’t… After the PTA meetings, I’d come home and want to kill him because I heard some bad things. The poor kid was shivering…absolutely miserable when it came time for the PTA meeting.
“He was always a good kid. He never fought with his older brother. They wrestled a lot in the basement.” (CD)
In a lecture on Lev. 14 circa 2009, Dennis said: "Is school a dictatorship? Yes! That's exactly what a school should be. That's the whole point. You don't have the same rights in fifth grade as an adult in school. That's the whole point of school. That's why you can't curse a teacher. You can curse a teacher in the street but you can't in school. I don't care if you want to stand or not [for the pledge of allegiance], you stand."
Max Prager wrote in chapter 30:

When Dennis was 9 years of age in 1957, he became extremely bored with his academic career at Yeshiva Rambam and created an atmosphere in his classroom which was not very conducive to learning. He would crack jokes and make his fellow students laugh and his Rebbi or secular teacher exasperated.
…When parent-teacher evenings occurred each semester, we did not look forward to these events as the reports were always depressing. Also, my poor son went into a fearful state a few days before the meeting. When he reached the 7th grade at the age of 12, Hilda and I felt that, perhaps, a change of venue would rectify the situation. Since Dennis would always be greeted by a new teacher with the words “Oh, you are Elimelach’s brother. I am sure that you will equal his accomplishments.” They surely did not take Education 101. The worst thing a teacher can do is to compare his pupil with his sibling.
I certainly do not absolve myself for the gross error in placing Dennis in the same school as Kenny. I should have been wise enough to realize that since Kenny was an exceptional student and athlete, he should have gone to a different yeshiva. To compound my stupidity, I enrolled him in Winsocki where Kenny was the lead actor in the annual plays and the best athlete.
…Hilda and were at wits end and completely lost as to what options we had in raising our son. I have heard Dennis remark many times on his radio program, when speaking of this episode in his life, that a teacher at Rambam advised me as to the course of action that I eventually took. I dislike correcting my son, but his statement is erroneous.
The truth is as follows: since I always have a brief conversation with my spiritual Father before falling asleep, one night full of anguish and pain, I implored him to guide me in the correct parental path I should take with Dennis. Believe it or not, I awoke the following morning with a modus operandi. A day or two later, I sat Dennis down in my home office and the two of us were alone. I remember, as though it happened yesterday, the exact words that poured from my mouth.
I told him that, as his father, I loved him and will always love him. However, respect has to be earned and I could not respect his actions. I then took a risk in informing him that from that moment on, the word “school” would be taboo in our home. I would never ask him if he had homework, what his grades were, and, in fact, did not have to attend school.
From that moment on, he made a 360 degree turn in his academic life. What he needed was a hands-off approach from his parents that automatically eliminated the severe tension that had been building up throughout his school years. His grades improved substantially, he was elected president of his senior class and was editor of the yearbook.
Not being a psychologist, I cannot state definitely why Dennis behaved in the manner that he did. However, my guess is that since he feared not living up to his brother’s achievements, he preferred attributing any low grades that he may receive in the future to his poor behavior rather than being accused of stupidity.

I can’t say that my childhood was particularly happy. I didn’t like school. My parents were not happy that I didn’t like school. I got thrown out of class so regularly that there was a chair in the elementary school office [at Yeshiva Rambam] that was called the Dennis Prager chair. I got thrown out for very valid reasons. Most of the time I would just talk. I was practicing for my profession. I’d write notes and send them to other kids. I’d play tricks on the girls.
When I was a kid, we all came into class with briefcases with all your supplies. So you’d keep your briefcase by your desk. It was a source of awesome pleasure for me to arrange with a couple of the guys to switch the girl’s briefcases who were sitting in the front because I thought of them as goody two-shoes and I had a hatred for goody two-shoes. I thought they were just trying to show the teacher they were terrific so I would just try to get them in trouble as much as possible.
I would frequently beat up bullies. That was a hobby of mine. There’s a big residue of that in me today. I am for beating up bullies. I hate bullies. If they were picking on some kid… I was always the biggest in the class. It’s not like I was Mr. Courageous but I couldn’t stand what they did.
My parents would get called very regularly and they would get very upset that I wasn’t a good kid at school. I was an angel at home but I was a devil at school.
The nadir came in eighth grade when I signed the report card. And I was proud of my abilities in script writing. I remember thinking, yeah, this looks pretty genuine. I would’ve gotten away with that except that when I was sick one day, my mother looked through my drawers and found all these report cards she hadn’t seen.
I also went to sleepaway camp for eight weeks a summer from the age of five. Frankly, that was too long. My grandfather would come on my birthday in the middle of summer and I would scream and cry to go back with him. They were a great source of love for me, my grandparents, in particular my mother’s parents.
High school was much more pleasant for me though things at home got tougher and I threatened to run away. But I was serious about running away. It wasn’t the typical kid threat.
My older brother was always good in everything. My parents couldn’t believe how two kids could be so different.
My brother interceded. I knew he was my last chance. He said, mom and dad, you have to listen to Dennis or he’s going to run away.
I even knew what I was going to do. I was going to go to Idlewild Airport. That’s before it was John F. Kennedy. And I was going to work in the luggage area for one of the airlines and get myself on it, or so were my dreams. I’m sure my wanderlust was shaped in part by my visits every Sunday to the airport just to photographer airplanes. I dreamed about airplanes. I collected time tables.
He told my parents, you’ve got to leave him alone. You can’t bug him anymore about grades or about school. They said, parents can’t do that. We’re abdicating our role. And he said, you have no choice. You’re going to lose your son if you don’t leave him alone.
My father said he actually spoke to G-d. He said, G-d, what am are we going to do? We’re tried punishment. We’ve tried yelling. We’ve tried discipline. We’ve tried notes from school. Nothing has worked.
The school psychologist and my brother prevailed upon my parents to leave me alone and let me raise myself. And they agreed. And from the age of 14 on, they never asked if I got a report card. They never asked if I had homework.
I lived at home the first two years of college. One day I said, ma, I’m off this week. And with a totally straight face, she said, I thought you were off last week, which shows you how much class I didn’t go to. There was no way to know when I was off and when there was school.
This was very dramatic in my life because from age 14 on, I was a happy person. I needed to be left alone. I know that my loathing of controls by government over people, even in America where we are putting more and more laws on people, they actually unnerve me. I can only thrive in freedom. I’m very good at imposing laws on me but I don’t want them imposed by others.
My parents gave me money to eat supper out. They gave me $1:50 a day to eat dinner wherever I wanted.
After school, I’d take a subway into Manhattan and go to museums and concerts and plays. I didn’t do any homework.
Eating out has never ceased being a good psychological feeling for me of freedom. I still love to eat out. It is a credit to the home Fran has made that I am now happy to eat at home.
To this day going to Denny’s and getting a tuna melt is fun. It’s still exciting. Anything I want! I’m not restricted to the menu at home. There’s no chance I’ll have liver.
[On his show Sept. 1, 2010, Dennis said he has not had a $200 restaurant tab in his life.]
Once a week, my mother would serve a food that should not be eaten by humans — liver. I like anything but I hate liver.
I’d find out when liver would be served and I’d make sure not to be home that night.
Who would tell me when we had liver? We had a housekeeper, a black woman. Ethel was my confidant in life. I told Ethel everything. Ethel loaned me money to buy hockey magazines. I don’t know if I ever paid her back. Ethel was my surrogate mother. I am convinced that this had an effect on the ease and comfort I have always felt with people of any race. The profound role an African-American woman played in my upbringing. When I had a bad report card, I went to her.
I am thoroughly abnormal. Never in my life have I liked parties. I didn’t understand. What do you do at a party? It was very loud. My mode of communication is to speak. Anytime there is loud music, I can’t speak. I’ve lost all of my interest and my powers. I was as interested in girls as any of the guys who went to parties but party wasn’t going to be my method of meeting anybody.
What was my method? It was not a successful one in high school I had these dreams of meeting a girl who loved music like I do at Carnegie Hall. It didn’t happen.
I had a hobby called short-wave radio listening. I got for my bar mitzvah from my grandfather a great short-wave radio — the Zenith Transoceanic. For me to pick up Radio Moscow.. Starting my second year of high school, I became transfixed by the enemy (communism). I listened and I was intoxicated. Not persuaded. Not for a second. I’ve always loved propaganda. It fascinates me how people try to sell what is not true.
I would listen to Radio Moscow in English [while smoking a pipe]. They said, if you will write to us, we will send you a complete set of books on how to learn Russian. So I sent away. I will never forget the thick packet filled with Soviet stamps arrives at my parent’s house in Brooklyn. It was so exciting. I looked at it. Somebody licked these stamps in Moscow!
It was also exciting unfortunately to the government. My next batch of mail was from Radio Peiking. We had no relations with communist China. People get packs of things from China were suspect in the eyes of the Post Office and they tore my mail open.
I wrote a letter to the then senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, saying to him what happened and that I should be allowed to get unmolested mail from communist China. And he wrote back. It’s one of the many things that I regret throwing away.
I did start learning Russian.
I’ll never forget when my parents went to a parent-teacher meeting, the nadir of my existence. I hated when my parents went to talk to my teachers because none of them said what a wonderful student we have there. It was always a bad report. It was not a happy night when they went.
One night they went and met my close friend Joseph Telushkin’s parents. My father said to the Telushkins, ‘We should’ve sent Dennis to a Russian school. Then he’d be studying Hebrew.’
It was a good line and very true because under my desk I read two things during classes — the New York Times and Russian. The Herald-Tribune had closed by then. It was my first paper of choice. The rabbis of the school were not happy that I was not studying their holy subjects. One teacher said to me, and it was all in Hebrew, I did learn Hebrew rather well, because all these teachers came from Israel and didn’t speak English, and he said to me, ‘No New York Times? Go back and bring it in and then you can come back in.’ That’s how bitter he was.
I remember the Torah portion then was the ten things the Chief Priest wore in the holy Temple. And I could not think of a more boring thing to study.”
I did get to speak at graduation even though I graduated 92nd in a class of 110 because I was president of the class.
They were very grade conscious in my school and they divided us A, B, C, D. A = very bright. B = pretty bright. C = a little stupid. D = very stupid. I started in the D class and graduated in the C class. Telushkin went from moderately smart to moderately stupid. He’s now the most prolific author in Judaism in America.
I spent most of my four years [of high school] laughing. It was a very happy hilarious time.
My parents every so often very gingerly raised that however much I enjoyed learning Russian and conducting symphonies, the world was not going to grade me on that. How was I going to get a job?

Happiness

“I loved being 14,” said Dennis. “I hated being 13. Fourteen started a happy period in my life.” (Dec. 17, 2010)
On his show Jan. 25, 2011, Dennis said: “The single funniest story from all of my childhood — in eighth grade, one of the kids tooted in class. The rest of the class laughed. The principal was walking by and the door was open and he passes by and sees the kids laughing. He gets very angry. He walks in and yells at the class, ‘What’s the big stink about?’
“It was the only time in my life I laughed so hard, I thought I might choke. I fell off my chair. It was pandemonium. The teacher knew what was happening and he was stifling laughing.”
On his show Feb. 24, 2011, Dennis said: “I was never bored, not even as a child.”
In a 1994 lecture on Exodus 2, Dennis said: “Stories never moved me as a kid. Maybe because I was never read any. It was a home that was very clear and talked about moral issues, but we weren’t story oriented. As I get older, the stories not only mean more to me, they mean more than anything to me.”
In his 2008 lecture on Leviticus 19, Dennis Prager said: “I am writing my autobiography. Tentatively, it’s about my three journeys — as a man, as an American and as a Jew. I’m writing the Jew part right now.
“Part of the reason I have such a powerful association with the Sabbath was that it was the only family time we had. That was the time we ate together — Friday night and Sabbath afternoon.
“When I would make a family, I had only one image — the family at the Shabbat table because that was our only family time.
“To this day, when I visit my family in New Jersey, we’re together on Shabbat. We’re not together on a Monday. We’re busy.”
Dennis Prager’s best friend, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, wrote three paragraphs in the Summer 2001 issue of Olam magazine that seem to be about Dennis:

I have a friend who grew up harboring deep resentment toward his parents. He often lamented, “They never really cared about me. They had little time for me, they didn’t take my ideas seriously, and they were always getting angry at me.”
But one day, his attitude started to soften. It all happened when he became a parent, and found himself getting up at 3 a.m. to bring a bottle to his crying daughter.
“I realized then that my parents probably devoted far more hours to me than I had ever previously thought. The fact that I survived to my teenage years with all my fingers and toes intact means that they were watching me far more than I realized.”

On his radio show Nov. 11, 2009, Dennis said: “I was quite unhappy at 13. It was my unhappiest year. Almost overnight, I know why, my parents stopped intervening in my life. I was an abnormal child. I taught myself Russian and how to conduct orchestras… To their credit, not only did they not ask me if I had homework, they didn’t ask to see my report card. They allowed me to sign it for them…. They had no choice. I was going to leave the house. They knew it. I was always strong-willed.
“Around fourteen-and-a-half, fifteen, I blossomed. That blossoming is very powerful now in my remembrance and how it was in daily life. College is a blur compared to high school.”
“High school [meaning tenth grade] was my turning point.”
“High school was transformational for me in my last three years. I am who I was then. Massive details changed in my life since high school but not Dennis.”
“I’ve had a very exciting post-high school life… It got more exciting. There was nothing exciting that happened to me in high school but it was transformational that period of time. I began to know Dennis and be who I am.”
“There were a fair number of years when I was truly unhappy,” said Dennis Nov. 12, 2010. “It did inoculate me [from future unhappiness]. I became an unbelievably grateful human.”
As a child, Dennis thought about what people would say about him at his funeral. (Dec. 13, 2010)
“My goal in life since high school was to influence as many people as possible.” (Jun. 21, 2011)
Dennis was raised to not take the easy way out. “I didn’t like this idea when I was a child, and my family sometimes carried it to an extreme, but this principle has served me well as an adult.”
One day when he was 15, Dennis decided to be happy. “I was on a New York subway train. I remember it vividly. It was a fairly empty car. My arms were outstretched on the two sides of me, leaning on the backs of the row. I remember saying to myself, ‘It is very easy to be unhappy. Any jerk can be unhappy’.” (Radio show, Dec. 6, 2009)
“I don’t get despondent over the bad stuff,” said Dennis. “I am very touched by people’s kind words to me but I don’t let it go to my head and I don’t let the insults go to my heart. It’s a great equilibrium to have. I trade in feeling great over the compliments for not feeling hurt over the insults.”
“My temperament is even-keeled. And I thank God for it. I think people enjoy being with people who are even-keeled rather than being with people on some sort of emotional rollercoaster.”
“As my wife puts it, ‘I know how you’ll be tomorrow.’” (Jan. 22, 2010)
“I was raised by my society,” said Dennis on his radio show March 18, 2010. “I was raised by my teachers. I was raised by my rabbis. I was raised by my parents’ friends.”
“If my parents micro-managed my life, I would not be Dennis Prager. I’d be a wimpier guy.”
“I didn’t think my parents understood me. I’m sure my teenage kids said the same thing about me.” (May 21, 2010)

On March 20, 2013, Dennis said: "When I was a student, the last thing that we thought of was expressing ourselves. We believed that society, named the school, had certain principles that we conformed to or left the school or embraced those differences as adults."

“The blind men and the elephant — the only poem I ever really enjoyed.” (May 20, 2010)

Walter Jenkins Arrested 1964

Dec. 23, 2013, Dennis said: "Gays should never be harassed. I have always supported that. one of the reasons that I didn't become a Republican until the Reagan era was what happened. It seared me. When some people in the Goldwater campaign outed a gay advisor to Lyndon Johnson and ruined his life. Some people followed him into a men's room. I thought that was so despicable that I couldn't become a Republican, even though I was always anti-left." According to Wikipedia:

A month before the 1964 presidential election, on October 7, 1964, District of Columbia Police arrested Jenkins in a YMCA restroom. He and another man were booked on a disorderly conduct charge.[4] an incident described as "perhaps the most famous tearoom arrest in America."[5] He paid a $50 fine.[6] Rumors of the incident circulated for several days and Republican Party operatives helped to promote it to the press.[7] Some newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Enquirer, refused to run the story.[8] Journalists quickly learned that Jenkins had been arrested on a similar charge in 1959,[9] which made it much harder to explain away as the result of overwork or, as one journalist wrote, "combat fatigue."

Finally, on October 14, a Washington Star editor called the White House for Jenkins' comment on a story it was preparing. Jenkins turned to White House lawyers Abe Fortas, the President's personal lawyer, and Clark Clifford, who unofficially was filling the role of White House Counsel. They immediately lobbied the editors of Washington's three newspapers not to run the story, which only confirmed its significance.[11][12] and within hours Clifford detailed the evidence to the President and press secretary George Reedy, "openly weeping,"[13] confirmed the story to reporters. Probably forewarned, Johnson told Fortas that Jenkins needed to resign.

Sex II

In a speech Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said: “About eighth or ninth grade, the rabbis in my yeshiva took the boys aside and said, ‘Boys, you shouldn’t go to dirty movies, but if you go, take your yarmulke off’.”
“So we took our yarmulkes off. We followed advice number two,” said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 32.
Said Dennis in a 1996 lecture on Exodus 12: “I remember as a teenager when I first came across one of my favorite sections in the book stores — sex manuals with titles like, ‘How to Have Better Sex.’ And I thought, I can’t believe people need books on how to have better sex. What is more natural than having sex? Gorillas know how to do it. People need a book?”
In a 1997 lecture on Exodus 22: 18-24, Dennis said. “The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, unless it has parameters and is deep, it doesn’t give the same thrill as the last time. The first time you kissed a girlfriend, bells were going off and the world was splitting and you were having a Sinaitic experience, but unless you love somebody, kissing loses that power… The human being wants more… If the pursuit is pleasure, then intercourse is not enough. You want three people. That may well be why there is a pursuit of bisexuality. Maybe people will not suffice. There must be a thrill available to [bestiality]. That you can’t relate to it and I can’t relate to it, most perversions I can relate to, this is not one of them, that is irrelevant. Perhaps not doing it, but watching it. There are porn films of bestiality right now at your local porn shop. That is available for $49.99.
“It’s really not appropriate for a chumash class but the Torah is open so I will be open, but I once saw years ago in New York on 42nd Street, a video titled Three Nuns and a Donkey. Somebody bought it.”

On his radio show Dec. 3, 2009, Dennis Prager discussed sexting (the sending of explicit images via cell phones). “What happens to people who are thrust into a world of pure sex at an early age? My prediction? Vast numbers of females will not enjoy sex in their marriage…based on talking to women on the radio precisely about this. The earlier and the more extensive the sexual behavior of the female, the less she identifies sex with joy and more she identifies it with being used, which she is. Whatever feminism has taught about male and female being the same and sex is as meaninglessly joyful to a female as to a male, the victims of that feminist idiocy have been female. The guys are scratching their heads about how lucky they got that a generation of females was raised to believe that they could enjoy sex without commitment like guys can. I don’t think this is good for the guys either. One of the great joys of growing up is to work your way into sex and romance. To win over a female is the biggest single reason men achieve. If you can win over females by doing nothing, which is what is done when you are 15, you will not be ambitious. That will be one of the never-mentioned bad consequences to boys. When I was in high school, I believed I had to become something to get a pretty girl. I had to be a man in some way. I recall very vividly as much as I love music, I wanted to be good at piano to get a girl. Anything that made a girl go wow, I pursued. That’s been true since caveman. Look at me, I killed lion better. And he got the women. The klutz who couldn’t kill a lion engaged in auto-eroticism.”
“This is a generation that has no thrill from the things that thrilled generations passed… If I got a telescope or electric trains, I was tremendously excited. Or a stereo. Or got a chance to go to a restaurant. That was a big deal when I was a kid. Or to go to a baseball game. Big deal. It’s not such a big deal anymore.”
“I am very aware of how I come across at any given moment… I was realizing as I said it that I sounded like one of these adults, not with it, you’re just hung up about sex.
“Anybody who knows, who has read me, who has heard me, who has my four CDs on male sexuality, if there is anybody who is not hung up about that subject is yours truly. What I am hung about is protecting kids’ innocence. I think it stymies the growth of kids to sexualize them so early.
“The hyper-sophisticated will say that even five year olds according to Freud play with themselves and explore and have sexual feelings. I’m talking about a consciousness in the mind. When I looked up girls skirts when I walked up the steps in kindergarten, I was not thinking about sex. I was thinking what’s under that skirt. It was as innocent as it gets. Obviously it has sexual overtones but I didn’t know that and that’s what matters. The thought that when I was 14, a girl in my class would send me a naked picture of her, it’s a new world, and it’s not a better world for it.”
Said Dennis March 23, 2011: “Well into college, just the thought of kissing a girl was so exciting.”
Said Dennis April 20, 2011: “I remember in high school and college and I thought, why am I doing all of these things? And then I realized, it was to impress a woman.”
Dennis did not experiment with drugs. "There's some inner boredom in one's soul that seeks this excitement. What do you learn from a psychedelic experience? Not to mention that it's Russian Roulette. How do you know it won't permanently destroy parts of your brain? For what end?"
"The more a kid is excited by things in life, the less likely they are to look at this. What I didn't understand, there was so much. I didn't understand why girls weren't enough to provide excitement? I don't mean just sex. Just girls. Just chasing girls. Trying to get a girlfriend. It was unbelievable. But it's not true today. There's such jadedness." (April 23, 2012)

Dennis said Nov. 30, 2010: “I remember in high school thinking that the boys who were unbelievably confident in their dealings with girls were not the finest of the guys. I was very nervous about asking a girl out for a date, so much so that I would sit by the phone with prepared notes so that I wouldn’t grope for words and I would have a handkerchief to wipe the sweat because I was so nervous.”
On Jun. 8, 2013, Dennis said: "That's why I was sweating while making the call. The parent would pick up the phone and I'd go, 'Can I speak to Michelle?' And they'd always say, 'Who is this?' I always felt like a rapist calling in. 'Who is this? What are your intentions,you no-good male animal?' I never got that, but that's what I imagined was going through his head."
"I have too much pride. That's why I've never been able to push myself aggressively professionally as others have, and I've been wrong. I have too much pride and dignity. If the girl said, I'm busy Saturday night, I would not have offered another time. She would've had to have said, 'So let's do it next Saturday night.' I would not be the injector of the next possible date. I would not say, 'When are you free?'"
"I had a blessed track record."

"Blessed" is one way of looking at it. Prager's total number of women "dated" is surely a larger number than that of any of his Orthodox-for-life classmates who tended to marry but once. People who are constant in their religious observance and in their dating tend to later be constant in their mating while those who experiment more in their religion and in their dating tend to have more turbulence.

Some people, such as Max Prager, marry their high school sweethearts and stay with them for life, while others, such as Dennis Prager, go from woman to woman to woman, trying in vain to get what they missed out on early in life. 

There are no victims in relationships, says family systems therapist Mark E. Smith. You pick one person to love you and meet your needs and then find that you instinctively chose someone who will suck at meeting your needs and will instead re-enact your childhood trauma. This gives you the opportunity to learn about yourself and to get healthy.

On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis said: "I'm a very serious man, but not in demeanor, in thoughts. That's why dating was a little hard in high school because I wanted to talk about heavy duty stuff... I wanted to get into heavy stuff immediately. Stop that... I'm talking in a nicer way. Well, the other one is nice too."

Yeshiva of Flatbush

Dennis attended the coed modern Orthodox day school Yeshiva of Flatbush (“one of the two most modern and sophisticated Orthodox Jewish day schools in America” according to Dennis) with such classmates as the writer Leon Wieseltier, composer Michael Isaacson and journalist Stuart Schoffman.
Said Dennis in a 2007 lecture on Leviticus 8: “I went back to the yeshiva high school I graduated from, which became more Orthodox. They had cheerleaders for the basketball games when I was there. Cheerleading ended a few years after I left because it wasn’t considered modest dress. And it wasn’t, which was one of the reasons I liked that yeshiva.”
In another lecture, Dennis described his yeshiva’s cheerleaders as “a bit zaftig.”
Screenwriter Robert J. Avrech went to Flatbush with Dennis:

Back in the 50's and 60's there were quite a few violent teachers in the Yeshiva of Flatbush. Mrs. Katz, a nasty piece of work, used to make us lay our hands palm up and she would take her wooden ruler and WHACK us with it. Mr. Zilber would take an eraser and throw it at us, usually aiming for our heads. Mr. Weinstein would grab us by the neck and squeeze until it felt like our neck was breaking. We thought that this was normal behavior. It was not until I was much older–actually not till I got to college and had the chance to speak to kids who went to public schools–that I learned how backward my Yeshiva was. I make no excuses for these people. None of them were traumatized Holocaust survivors. They were just a bunch of nasty creeps who hated children. How Yeshiva Flatbush ever got its stellar reputation for excellence is something of a mystery. My years were positively Dickensian. I still have nightmares that I’m back on East 10th street.

Since the age of 14, I have had a lifelong love affair with books and learning, but this was always despite school. I loathed my elementary school, I read non-school books underneath my desk all through high school, graduated 92nd in a class of 120 [Joseph finished 88th], and I skipped the majority of my classes in college. (Ultimate Issues, Jul-Sep. 1989, pg. 16)

“Grades don’t mean crap later in life,” said Dennis Dec. 3, 2010 (he had a B average in high school).
“The more parents point out to their kids in a loving way what you need to do to be a better human being, the less narcissistic you will be. To this day, I hear my parents voices in me, ‘You’re lazy!’ ‘You didn’t pick that up!’
“I am obsessed with leaving my radio studio exactly as I found out for the next guy who broadcasts because my parents pounded it in to me to leave it the way I found it. I was a typical boy happy to leave towels on the floor, underwear strewn all over the place, and my garbage all around.
“I am who I am because I did not have high self-esteem as a kid.”
On March 8, 2011, Dennis said: “Every kind good adult I know was not raised with self-esteem, including me.”

In the Jewish Journal, Dennis wrote Feb. 27, 2013: "The truth is that I never suffered from high self-esteem. I have long had self-confidence with regard to specific abilities. But I had little self-esteem as a child, and as an adult, I have earned whatever self-esteem I have. Moreover, in the depths of my soul I believe that the janitors in my building are not one whit less worthy or valuable than me."
On May 7, 2010, Dennis said: “I’m memory-challenged. I always have been.”
“My poor memory. I can not remember the simple one-sentence prayer from the 1962 [Supreme Court] ruling.” (May 7, 2010)
Joseph struck his classmates as smart and articulate. He wrestled with big questions. Descending from a long line of rabbis, Telushkin surprised no one by becoming an Orthodox rabbi.
Dennis was known as a loudmouth in high school. He did not strike his classmates as particularly religious and few thought he’d go on to be a moral leader. They saw he oozed need for female attention, more than any one woman could likely provide. They were not surprised when he bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend and from marriage to marriage.
“I hate to be told what to do unless it has a divine source,” said Dennis. “I don’t want morons telling me what to do.” (May 7, 2010)
In a Feb. 17, 2009 lecture on Lev. 19:17-18, Dennis said: “I remember when I was in high school and college, I used to say to my best friend Joseph, ‘Sometimes, Joseph, I am overwhelmed by the fact that you are as real as I am.’”

On his show Oct. 28, 2011, Dennis said: "My purpose for being in the public sphere is to influence. If I were to run for public office, it would not be for the power but for the influence. I'm not power hungry in the least. I just want to touch lives. That's been my ambition since I was 15. I wrote it in a diary I kept in high school."

On his radio show Oct. 22, 2010, Dennis said: “I remember when I was a kid, a left-wing magazine had a headline – '250 Psychiatrists Declare Barry Goldwater Mentally Ill'.
“I remember thinking, isn’t that an abuse? How do these psychiatrists know his mental state? Has he been a patient of theirs?”
“I’ve never written G-d in my life. I even wrote an essay against it in a big Jewish magazine. I think it is utterly irrational. God’s name isn’t God. It’s Jehovah.
“It’s another one of these added stringencies that I don’t support.
“Some terrific websites publish my column and spell it as G-d.”

Cheating

On his radio show Aug. 14, 2009, Dennis said: “When I was in high school, most of the kids in my class, virtually, cheated on tests. In a class of 120, 117 cheated. By the way, Joseph Telushkin was one of the others [who did not cheat]. I remember that one of the reasons I didn’t cheat on tests was self-image, not morality.”
In a Feb. 17, 2009 lecture on Lev. 19:17-18, Dennis said: “I had an advantage over my classmates. I didn’t care what college I got into. Many of them were aching to get into the Ivy Leagues.”
“I started a campaign against cheating. I learned to my great amazement and happiness that I had the ability to criticize without being hated. They elected me president of the graduating class. I remember being shocked that I won given that I thought that a lot of them thought I was some holier-than-thou guy. I learned there are ways to reprove and not be resented.”

Christianity

Dennis Prager never heard about “unconditional love” from his rabbis. He wrote April 21, 2009: “In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd.”
Said Dennis in a 2000 lecture on Numbers 6: “If my rebbe had said in yeshiva, ‘Dennis, you have an individual relationship with God’, I would’ve had a heart attack. I would’ve thought he had become a Christian.”
In a 2005 lecture on Deut. 24:5, Dennis said: “I’ve read Christian theologians since college. They made me aware of the battle with secularism. My yeshiva didn’t make me aware of these things. My yeshiva taught me how to build a succah and how to keep kosher and that was great, but the great over-arching concerns about how to battle the false gods of modern life, Christians opened my mind to that.”

Life Mission

Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on 25 years in broadcasting:

I wrote in my diary in my junior year of high school that I now know what I want to do with my life. I have a mission in life — to influence people to the good.
I found myself in high school and I never lost me.
The bad side was that I had no idea how I would make a living.
I did believe I could touch people’s lives. How did I know that? How did I know that anybody would want to hear me? I was a kid. Here’s how I knew:
My father was a CPA. On Sundays he would work at home and not in his office in Manhattan. We had a wood-finished basement where he kept his office. Many of his clients would come on Sundays.
Starting in my sophomore and junior year in high school, some of his clients would come an hour early to talk to me. I couldn’t believe this. Why would all these adults want to talk to me? Do I have anything to say of importance?
And then at camp, the counselors would come to my bunk…
I was born an adult.

There is a clear bifurcation between the Torah’s view of sexual matters and the rabbinical view of sexual matters…
It is clear to me that Onan did not get killed by God because he masturbated. If God killed masturbators, there would be nobody left… Why would God kill a masturbator?
It’s the sort of thing that wreaks havoc on a lot of especially boys’ mentalities.
I was a counselor in Orthodox Jewish camps for years. I remember we’d have bull sessions with the campers. I’d always have 13 and 14 year olds because I was the biggest Jew in camp and I could handle these monsters…
It was really something to me when I would talk to them the first night of camp. I remember this vividly. I would walk in the dark back and forth in the bunk and they would all be on their cots lying there listening to me avidly, and I would talk to them about the birds and the bees because a lot of them could not talk to their fathers and certainly not their rabbis at yeshiva. When I told them my view on masturbation, they were shocked. They would confide that they were told it was like murder, a terrible terrible sin and they were going out of their minds. And for what?
I would truly have to ask about any act called a sin, who the hell does that hurt? Of all the acts I could think of to induce guilt in humanity, that’s the last one I would bother doing that about.
It is sad that religion in the western world has become so associated with suppression of sex.
…Immoral is if I coerce you. Pre-marital sex falls short of the holiness ideal Judaism has for sex, which is in marriage, but that is not the same as immoral.
By labeling every unholy act immoral, religion has done a great disservice and caused a lot of people to reject religion. In their hearts, the vast majority of people who have engaged in pre-marital sex in a consensual manner, do not think they have engaged in an immoral act. When you tell people they have done something and in their gut they know they didn’t, you are going to get a reaction. And you’re going to lose credibility. Religion has lost a lot of credibility in the West because of sex. 

When Dennis was a counselor at Massad one summer, we received a phone call around 1 a.m. one night informing us that our son was in a bad auto accident not very far from the camp; the call was from a hospital in Scranton, Pa. You can just imagine our fear of not knowing the condition of our son.
We immediately left in our car with much trepidation, again not knowing what is awaiting us. Arriving at the hospital about 4 a.m., we asked the nurse on duty for the room number where Dennis was lying; she replied that she would escort us to visit him. Instead of being in a room, he was lying on a gurney in the hall. The gurney next to him was occupied by a lovely young lady who was his passenger. His face was covered with bandages as he suffered a broken nose; the girl also suffered facial injuries.
Fortunately, despite his condition, he was able to relate to us in detail all the facts of the accident. The car he was driving was an old car that Hilda had given him when she purchased a new one. Perhaps the brakes were bad and that may have caused the accident. Dennis and his companion were counselors at Massad and on their day off decided to go visit the areas around the camp.
They were returning to the camp in the late afternoon and, at a very sharp turn on a narrow road, the car hit a concrete wall. We were not interested as to whether Dennis or the car was at fault; we simply were concerned with the health of Dennis and the girl. He told us that the car was totaled-completely destroyed. He also told us that he picked up a young couple who were hitchhiking. Fortunately, they were let off a few minutes prior to the accident. Had they still been in the car, they would have been killed since the rear seats of the car suffered the most damage and the entire roof was shorn off and landed on those seats.

On his show Dec. 15, 2011, Dennis said: "I was in a terrible accident my first year of driving. I was driving with a girlfriend. That was part of the reason. I was not responsible. I was more interested in her than in the road. She was sitting right next to me. That's when there were bench seats in the front. I had one hand on her and one hand on the wheel. This was in rural Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains. And I had just dropped off a hitchhiker, a young guy. And about a minute later, or five minutes later, the road going downhill steeply narrowed into a little drawbridge. I put on the brakes. I smacked right into the back of the bridge. The entire back of the car was demolished. The hitchhiker, had he stayed on, would've died."

Talk Radio

“I was a big talk radio fan during the beginnings of this thing,” Prager said on his Feb. 1, 2007 show. “I would call in and get on pretty much when I called in. I would be in the upstairs and they’d [Prager's parents] be down in the basement and I’d scream, ‘I’m going on the radio.’
“I wonder what I talked about? I have no recollection.”

On June 15, 2012, Dennis said: "I was mesmerized. I never thought I'd be one, any more than if I went to the movies, I thought I'd be John Wayne."

Dennis particularly liked WNBC radio and WOR host Jean Shepherd.
According to a New York Times retrospective on the movie A Christmas Story:

Jean Shepherd narrated ‘A Christmas Story,’ giving voice to the adult Ralphie Parker, which makes sense because he wrote the Christmas adventure based on semi-fictional stories from his own childhood in Hammond, Indiana. Shepherd’s screenplay includes previously released material from several of his books. Also, Shepherd knew his way around a microphone, as he had a very popular three-decade radio career, during which he told stories, read poetry and organized listener stunts.

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; "slobism"; "creeping meatballism"; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in "trivia," bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone...

Like a lot of fine-tuned performing artists, Shepherd increasingly exhibited the whole range of symptoms common to the aging diva. He became paranoid and resentful of imagined rivals, whether they were old ones like Mort Sahl or upstarts like Garrison Keillor.

“I think if your job is to command the attention of a room and instill knowledge into people, then you're probably going to thrive on receiving that attention,” the Tulane graduate said. “That just comes with the work, right?”

Classical Music

In 1962, Dennis began listening to pop music, enjoying such songs as “Battle of New Orleans.” (July 23, 2010)
In late 1963, bored with school, Dennis explored Manhattan’s cultural attractions. One day he bought a $1 ticket to hear Alexander Schneider and his chamber group play Handel‘s Concerti Grossi at Carnegie Hall. Prager fell in love with classical music. The next day he spent two weeks lunch money and allowance ($32) to buy concert tickets at Carnegie.
Said Dennis in a 1995 lecture on Exodus 3: “The first time I heard Handel I was a sophomore. The next day I spent my entire two weeks allowance on concert tickets. Do you know what I ate for lunch for the next two weeks? I went to yeshiva high school where they had netilat yadayim, where you would wash your hands before making hamotzi after washing your hands, there would be little pieces of rye bread so you could make hamotzi immediately after you washed, I would wait for all the kids to do it, and then ate all the bag of hamotzi scraps.”
“I tried ballet for two seasons and all I did was to look at the orchestra pit.”
For the rest of high school, Dennis spent two-to-three evenings a week in Manhattan, going to plays, concerts and book stores. He often ate his dinner (tuna fish salad plate, apple pie and coffee for $1:50) at Dubrow’s Cafeteria by the subway station on King Highway. 

"I grew up eating tongue, but I couldn't do it today." (Dec. 31, 2013)
In his January 2002 "Personal Autobiography" lecture, Dennis said: “New York City was a great place to grow up in but not a great place to stay in. I used its facilities. If you use its culture, there’s no parallel. I conduct orchestras. Do you know how I learned to do that? Instead of doing homework, I prided myself on not doing a single homework through four years of high school, I am probably the only person you’ll ever meet who was rejected from Queens College, I would go to the New York Philharmonic Library and take out a score. I got quite adept. I would conduct at my father’s stereo system. Everyone thought I was just waving a baton but I knew that everyone was listening to me.”
“One of my fantasies…in the realm that I can speak to you about is conducting an orchestra and going to Antarctica.
“One day somebody called me up and said, Dennis, do you have any dreams not yet realized? I said, yeah, I’d like to conduct an orchestra.
“The next day, the president of a local orchestra said we’ll try you out. The conductor came and he said, wow, he knows how to read music. They gave me a Mozart piece. It was the most nervous I’ve been since childhood because these were all pros and I’m an amateur but it worked out and I went to other things.”
In his junior year of high school, Dennis founded The Hendryx Society (named after a large stuffed frog), which regularly published The Hendryxian. Prager used his newsletter to campaign against cheating on tests, which he said was widespread at his school. “It didn’t work,” said Dennis, July 9, 2010. “I didn’t get one convert.”

In June 1966, Dennis graduated Yeshiva of Flatbush and being the President of the senior class, he presented a gift to the school on behalf of his class at the commencement exercises. In May of 1965 and 1966, he was admitted to “Archon”, the honor society at the Yeshiva. Also, he received good grades in his Regents exams and was able to obtain a Regents Scholarship. Evidently, the advice I received from the Almighty paid off in dividends.
In his senior year, he applied to several colleges, including Columbia and one or two other Ivy League schools. His principal, whom I will not name, refused to forward his applications to any of the prestigious colleges. I was quite aware of the reason for this action since Yeshiva of Flatbush had an exemplary record of having its graduates accepted to these ivory towers. By refusing its students who did not have a high scholastic standing to apply to these colleges, it was able to retain this high record and used this as a vehicle to encourage elementary school graduates with high grades to enroll in Flatbush.
When Dennis informed me of the principal’s action, I saw red. I called the principal for an appointment to lodge my complaint. Incredibly, he refused to see me. I did tell him that if he continued to refuse to send my son’s application to whichever school Dennis wanted, I would be sure to disseminate his refusal to all newspapers in the city and his beloved Yeshiva would suffer the consequences.
I don’t remember whether he hung up on me; but I do recall that he did not reply. A few days later, Dennis told me that all his applications were forwarded. I knew quite well that because of his grades, other than the Regents grades he would not be successful in being accepted to any of the Ivy League colleges. However, no school official has the right to deny a student an opportunity to apply to any college he desires. Since he was not accepted by these schools, he went to Brooklyn College.

“I have never taken safe routes,” Dennis Prager said. “Sometimes I’ve fallen off the mountain, but you get up.” (April 2, 2010)
In a Feb. 25, 2012 public dialogue with Adam Carolla, Dennis said: "I haven't watched the Academy Awards in many years, but I did for many years, and it drove me nuts when an actress would get up, she grew up in rural Montana and now she's getting an award, and she'd say, 'I have a message for all you young girls out there. All you have to do is follow your dream and look at where I got.' Of course there are 86,000 waitresses to the one woman who got the Academy award and they're also following their dream. Maybe it is better to have parents saying you're a loser."
"When I was in my early 20s, I started getting paid to give lectures. And my mother said to me, 'They're paying you? I can hear you for free and I don't listen.'"

In  a July 12, 2012 dialogue with Carolla, Dennis said: "The Irish Day Parade in New York was the biggest parade. I was curious to know what is it like. I went in line and I marched with them and the line wobbled. At each bar, a certain number would leave the line for the bar and then come back and join the line."

At the end of high school, Dennis abandoned keeping a diary. He would forever regret it. (Lecture in 2008 on 25 years in broadcasting)
“There is a girl named Dina. I was 18. She was 19. We went out the whole summer. We were counselors at a summer camp. She set my life on its course because she listened to me and affirmed what I believed.” (Jan. 6, 2011)
“I’ll never forget the guy when I was 21, a [non-Jewish] friend of mine from rural Canada, came out of the photo store with me and said, ‘Dennis, I really Jewed him down.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Should I be offended?’ And of course I was not offended. He didn’t do that to hurt me because I was a Jew.” (Feb. 25, 2011)
Dennis told the guy this was inappropriate speech.

"I am unoffendable unless there's malicious intent, which I have not encountered." (Mar. 14, 2013)

On his radio show Jan. 2, 2012, Dennis said: "People strive for too much. There's a great Hebrew saying -- if you grab too much, you haven't grabbed anything. We don't raise our kids with wisdom aphorisms any longer. I learned so many in my religious school upbringing, every one went into my brain and stayed until this day and they have all affected my behavior. I'll never forget one -- let your ears hear what your mouth say. It has affected everything. It has probably helped me become a talk show host and a speaker."

“The rabbis [of the Talmud] distinguished between chukim (laws between man and God) and mishpatim (laws between man and man) as chukim are laws we can not understand and mishpatim are laws we can understand.
“There is a real problem asserting at the outset that there are laws we can not understand. If you believe that there are many laws that you can not understand, then you will never seek to understand them. That ends intellectual inquiry into their purpose.
“I grew up in the world that learned this way. It was the most difficult aspect of the thinking of the Judaism I was raised in, that there were laws I can never understand. There may well be, but to declare it at the outset means that it is pointless to try to understand.
“That leads to some terrible consequences — to an unintellectual observance of rules.
“For example, the law in Judaism of how you slaughter an animal. You take a blade that is extremely sharp, can not have any nick in it, and you have to be able to slice the animal’s throat in one cut across the neck.
“Everybody I know understands this as a way to minimize the animal’s suffering. Presumably the shochet (slaughterer) does it quickly.
“I was explaining this to a group in Halifax, Nova Scotia, about [1973]. In the audience was a newly ordained Orthodox rabbi who was trying out for his first pulpit.
“After I spoke about this, he politely raised his hand and said, ‘I disagree with Mr. Prager. We do not know why Jewish law ordains a sharp knife without a nick in it. He proclaims that it is to reduce the animal’s suffering but we don’t know that. The proof is that under Jewish law I can take a very long time in the speed with which I cut the animal’s throat, and then the animal will suffer.’
“I wanted to punch him. It was so painful to hear this was what he believed and this is what he was telling Jews, none of whom kept kosher.
“I believe you have to do things because God said so, but even if God said so, why did God give me a brain if not to understand why he said so?”
“Deuteronomy 4:1 said that these are the laws ‘so that you may live.’ So we’re told there is a purpose. Moses himself is giving a whole series of purposes to Biblical law. Do this so that you may live. If you don’t do this, you’ll die.”
“God is saying, I took you out of Egypt so that you could lead a holy life in the holy land.”
“This is how I justify God’s periodic decimation of the Jews when they leave the covenant.”
“If you don’t lead a holy life, I will have nothing to do with you and if I have nothing to do with you, you will die.”
Deuteronomy 4:6: “Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these chukim (decrees) and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” (NIV)
Dennis: “This sentence is the basis for my outlook on the purpose of Judaism.”
“The purpose of following chukim is so that the nations of the world look at you and be impressed that these are wise people and that these are wise laws that govern their lives. How could chukim mean laws we can’t understand if the rest of the world is supposed to understand them?
“They’ll just think, what a weird people! They observe laws we can’t understand.
“That is what the nations have often said about Jews. What a weird people. Why can’t they do this on Saturday and why do they dress like this?
“There’s nothing more tragic — aside from the loss of Jewish life — that this has not made sense to the world. The purpose of the Jewish people is to bring the world to God. How can you bring the world to God if you do things that the world can’t understand?”
“Because Jews can’t eat chicken with milk [thanks to rabbinic strictures], the whole lesson [that meat represents death and milk represents life and there should be no mixing] has been killed because chickens are not mammals. No mammaries, no mammals. Originally, there were rabbis of the Talmud who ate chicken with milk.
“God wants us to look wise… When you can explain what you do, the goyim find you more wise. And so do nonobservant Jews.”
Deut: 4:7 “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him?” (NIV)
Dennis: The Torah says that greatest does not come from great numbers or from great power, but from wisdom and understanding. “That’s exactly where Jewish greatness has come from. When people are impressed by Jews, it has been for wisdom and understanding or related to the intellectual or moral realm. Jewish greatness has never relied on power. Jewish greatness relies on the quality of life it leads and on their being intelligent.”
Deut: 4:8 “And which is a great nation that has righteous decrees and ordinances, such as this entire Torah that I place before you this day?” (Artscroll)
Dennis: “Laws can be unrighteous, so Moses adds an adjective about the type of laws we have. If chukim mean laws we can’t understand, how can he call them righteous? Adding that that they are righteous, it means you can understand.”
“The Torah is clear that how you look to the other nations is the whole point of this. God is interested in everybody. He has chosen a people to do something for the rest of humanity — to bring a message to them about God and holiness.”
“What is the argument that Moses uses to God to not kill the Jews? What will the goyim say if you kill the Jews? God cares about His image but the Jews shouldn’t care about their image?”

I went back to my yeshiva high school in Brooklyn. Once you become somewhat well-known, your alma maters all of a sudden take interest in you.
My high school said, oh Dennis, if you are ever back in Brooklyn and you have time, come speak to our classes.
So I thought that would be a great idea and I went there and I spoke to the six senior classes.
It’s a very prestigious yeshiva high school in New York. Bright kids. Of the yeshiva high schools, it’s among the most prestigious in the country.
I went in and I said, how many of you keep kosher?
It’s like asking, how many of you breathe? It’s a yeshiva. I wanted to set the stage. They all think I’m nuts but they all raise their hands.
How many of you think it is important to get other Jews to keep kosher?
Virtually every hand goes up.
I go, OK. Imagine I’m a Jew who doesn’t keep kosher. Raise your hand and I’ll call on you to explain to me why I should keep kosher other than God said so.
Not only did not one of six classes give me a reason, in each class they were offended by the question. They said to me, we were told by our rabbis that you don’t seek reasons for the commandments. That that is against the Torah to do that.
In a few of the classes, they said does rabbi so-and-so [head of Jewish studies] know what you’re saying here? I said, Rabbi So-and-so asked me here, but no, I don’t think he knows what I’m saying here.
They said to me, if we have reasons, Dennis, then the next person will come up and say, that’s not a good reason and then reject the commandment.

For the most part, the medieval [Jewish] philosophers accepted that there was natural law. The Chatam Sofer said that if you follow these so-called natural laws, you are following other gods...

In the late 1960s, Commentary magazine did a symposium. They did a second symposium about ten years ago [including Dennis Prager], but the first symposium was very good. The second one was not so good...

In the first symposium, for some reason, they asked Rabbi Moshe Tendler. He's not really a thinker, he's a scientist, a halakist. He said that we give tzedakah (charity) because it was commanded to give tzedakah. I remember reading that and thinking, none of the philosophically inclined would say that. That's a divine-command way of looking at matters.

According to Yeshaya Leibowitz, if you do a mitzvah to get close to God, you're serving yourself.

In a 2013 speech to National Religious Broadcasters, Dennis said: "When a 15-year old, when a 12-year old calls me up on my radio show, I know within 20 seconds if the kid was raised in a religious home. I'm batting a thousand because they actually have learned what the secular babyboomers taught to be untrue -- don't trust anyone over thirty."

Kenneth Prager Marries

On July 18, 1965, Kenneth Prager met his future wife Jeannie Gronich at Harvard. “I remember the transformation of my brother’s wife [in my mind],” said Dennis in a 1997 lecture on the Tenth Commandment. “I was a teenager when my brother was dating the woman he’s still married to. I remember reacting like a normal guy. She’s attractive. I’m attracted. The day they got engaged, I snapped. It was all of a sudden my sister-in-law. Certainly at the wedding. I observed the transformation in myself. It was now family and it entered an icky realm.”
Max Prager wrote in chapter 32:

It seems that Kenny inherited a Prager syndrome which prevented our males from leading a girl into a false illusion that we are serious in the relationship when we are not ready to make a commitment. Thus, Kenny made it clear to Jeannie that, although he liked her, he was still a medical student and marriage was not yet in the cards.
Consequently, they stopped seeing each other for a few months and Jeannie resumed dating other young men. However, Kenny, being Mac’s son, repeated his father’s dilemma when I was courting his mother. …Kenny, who was hesitant in committing himself, discovered that he was in love with Jeannie and called her for a date. From that moment on, neither one dated others.

Kenneth and Jeanie married in 1967. Dennis at the wedding.

Dennis Prager’s College Years

After high school, Dennis attended Brooklyn College (graduating in 1970 with degrees in History and Middle East Studies). 

On Feb. 18, 2013, Dennis said: "In freshmen English, the teacher was one of these progressive teachers, but she was very pretty, so I went to class every time. She said, 'Students, I want you to look out the window and write what you see.' I looked out the window and saw an apartment building, that's all there was, so I knew what would get me an A, if I wrote that I see the vapidness of modern life, the anonymity and atomization through each window, and I got an A, but it was baloney, all I saw was an apartment building."

On his radio show April 20, 2012, Dennis said: "For every one of you who went to college and graduated, what did you learn? I don't mean chemistry and pre-med [and the sciences]. In the United States for three of my four years, I learned Russian and I can't think of much more... I learned Arabic. In most other areas, it was the books that taught me."

"My year in England, I had two wonderful professors."

At the end of his first year of college, shortly after the Six Day War of 1967, Dennis made his first trip abroad, touring Israel and Europe.
“I first went to Jerusalem three weeks after the Six Day War in 1967 [staying with Pinchas H. Peli and his feminist wife],” wrote Dennis Prager for Olam magazine in 2001. “I was just under 19 years old. For a Jewish boy from the New York yeshiva world, one who moreover also attended Zionist summer camps in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, the experience was, not surprisingly, overwhelming. It is difficult to separate the power of Israel, the power of that uniquely heady time in Jewish history, and the power of Jerusalem. Each merged into the other to create a permanent impact on Jews such as myself.
“So deep was the impact, in fact, that I was certain that I would one day in the not too distant future make aliyah (live in the Jewish state). Indeed, three years later, after graduating from college, I applied to and was accepted by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study for a Masters Degree at its Institute on Contemporary Jewry.
“For various reasons, I enrolled instead at Columbia University, at its School of International Affairs, and consequently ended up staying in America. That decision came to be one of those life-shaping forks in the road that all of us at some point experience. Had Columbia not accepted me, this American patriot might well have ended up being an Israeli.”

On his radio show June 25, 2010, Dennis said that if he did not live in the United States, he would most likely live in Israel. Other possibilities were Canada, Australia and India.

The most consistent phone call Dennis received in his 30 plus years of broadcasting was "Is it safe to visit Israel?" (Mar. 24, 2012)

Said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 34: “I did a report on Egyptian art while I was in college. I remember one where you had the god Horace having anal sex with an Egyptian. There was a prayer to it — spread your buttocks.”
Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on “Why Have Our Universities Gone So Wrong?”: “There was one insight I’ve never forgotten over one of the urinals at Brooklyn College — Jesus saves, Moses invests.”
Said Dennis in a 2010 lecture on Leviticus 26, 27: “You do suffer for what your parents did.”
“I don’t hold a German responsible for the Holocaust but a German is plagued that his parents or grandparents did this. It doesn’t end because the suffering doesn’t end when it ends. The children of Holocaust survivors have suffered terribly. I know many of them.
“When I was a counselor in Jewish camps, very often there would be Holocaust survivor children in the bunks. We counselors knew… We would often say to each other that kids whose parents were Holocaust survivors had particular issues. How could they not?
“I dated a woman in Brooklyn who I nearly married when I was in college. She was the daughter of Holocaust survivors. We were very close. The junior year I went to England, we were corresponding and she wrote me, ‘My father hanged himself.’ He had a tracheotomy and survived but they thought he was dead.”
Said Dennis July 14, 2010: “I graduated high enough to get into Columbia for graduate work. I got a D in Geology. Well deserved. We had all these requirements. I had to take three semesters of college science — Geology, Physics and Biology. I am a character today and I was a character then.
“During Geology lab, I went out of my mind. In Geology lab, you have a partner who depends upon you to scratch a rock and figure it whether it is igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary. I did not care. It held no significance to me. Will it make my life better? Deeper? Kinder? Finer? Wiser? It didn’t.
“I have a much better view of Geology today but I was close-minded then. I drove my Geology lab instructor a little nuts because I would fool around like throw a rock at another kid. I didn’t know if I threw an igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary rock.
“And he’d throw it back. And that would bring me joy the likes of which I have never experienced.
“And I got a D. They used to send you postcards. You’d give your card and it would be mailed back to you.
“Underneath my grade, the instructor wrote: 'Dear Mr. Prager, I would’ve given you an F but I felt sorry for next term’s instructor.'"
On his show Dec. 21, 2010, Dennis said: “I’ll never forget my first Philosophy class at college and the professor began with, ‘Do we really exist?’ I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to go punch the professor in the nose and ask him if he thought I exist or not?’ Whack! Was that real, professor? The amount of nonsense that has pervaded the secular world is overwhelming.”
Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on universities: “Had I gone to Columbia for undergraduate, I would’ve dropped out. I was not ready as an undergraduate to do the work necessary for an Ivy league college.”

Said Dennis Sept. 3, 2010: “I just assumed life was going to deliver some very rough blows. You’re unbelievably lucky every day you don’t have anything bad happening. I said that to my dear friend Joseph in college and he said that it profoundly affected his life. I said, 'Joseph, I expect nothing good to make me happy. I am happy as long as nothing bad happened'.”
In a 1994 lecture on Gen. 32, Dennis said: “From an early age, I was content if I could buy all the records and books I wanted. That struck me as a millionaire’s life. There were times — very few — when I couldn’t buy records and they were very painful.”
Said Dennis on his Nov. 30, 2010 radio show: “When I was a kid, I had a Dutch pen pal – Steineka Deuze (sp?). I corresponded with Steineka for one year thinking I was corresponding with a boy. Then I went to Amersfoort, Netherlands, and found out that my pen pal was a girl. It was very disorienting and very pleasant.”

We Have Reason To Believe

At age 21, Dennis Prager was impressed by the Rabbi Louis Jacobs book We Have Reason To Believe. “I thought, wow, we can use the faculty of reason to believe in God? Just the title alone changed my life.” (Aug. 3, 2010)
“I was enthralled by [the leading 19th Century Jewish philosopher] Hermann Cohen in college because he combined reason and Judaism.” (2003 lecture on Deut. 10)

Keeping Kosher On An Interdate

In his second lecture on Leviticus 20 in 2009, Dennis Prager said: “When I was in my bachelor days in my twenties, I went out with women of all backgrounds. I intended to only marry someone born Jewish or converted to Jewish. My one criteria was -- is it a woman?
“I kept kosher and still do. I was going to write a long article for Jewish publications titled, ‘Keeping Kosher on an Interdate.’
“I said this publicly at the time, I would tell Jewish audiences, ‘Folks, it is a little eery. When I am with a non-religious Jewish woman, she thinks that what I am doing by disqualifying many things on the menu because I am a Jew is absurd. Whenever I am with a non-Jewish woman, she has such respect for what I am doing. Every one has said, ‘I am not going to order anything like that either. What would offend you?”
“Of course it doesn’t offend me if a non-Jew has a BLT. I just salivate.”

Dennis Prager's relaxed version of "keeping kosher" is outside the bounds of the Jewish tradition, as is Prager's idea of "keeping kosher on an interdate." From a traditional Jewish perspective, a Jew should not date non-Jews in the hopes that they might convert. Such a practice does not lead to a stable life and with his three marriages, Dennis has not led a stable life. Prager's second and third wives converted to Judaism to marry him. 

In a 2007 lecture on Leviticus 3, Dennis said: “A very prominent rabbi who I have been friends with since high school [Joseph Telushkin], during the days when I could influence him towards greater sinning, when I was in graduate school in Manhattan, I lived in Manhattan, there was a restaurant I ate at frequently. The one thing I miss from New York is the restaurants. I ate out all the time. If I had food in my own apartment, I would’ve died of botulism. A classic bachelor. I ate out every meal.
“There was a place near my house on Broadway that had the most delicious eggplant parmesan that I had ever eaten at in my life. What’s eggplant parmesan? It’s eggplant and cheese and marinara sauce, which is perfectly fine kosherly, but this was really delicious eggplant parmesan.
“I brought this man, a prolific author, we’re the same age, we were both in our early 20s, I said, Joseph, you have to have this eggplant with me. It’s delicious. I had eaten it 30 times.
“Joseph starts eating it and says, ‘Dennis, this is delicious but I think I know why — because it is a meat sauce.’ I wanted to kill him. I could never have it again.
“How come he knew immediately? Because he was more fastidious about observance than I was.”

In a radio dialogue with Adam Carolla Apr. 17, 2012, Dennis said: "A mere kiss was awesome when I was 18. If she gave me a kiss on the lips, I was in ecstasy for a week."

In contemporary terms, this kind of high is likely a symptom of sex and love addiction.

On his radio show Dec. 21, 2010, Dennis said: “[Going to Columbia University for graduate school] didn’t exactly bowl the women over. I had no good pick-up lines. I did well with women but it had nothing to do with good opening lines. I never did. I always believed that any opening was absolutely seen through by the girl and seen as another opening line.”
“A girl would ask me, ‘What are you interested in?’ ‘Ethical monotheism.’
“‘Ethical monotheism! Come to my room!’”
On his show Jan. 25, 2011, Dennis said: “Do you know how many girls I picked up in bookstores when I was a kid in my 20s? It was a wonderful place. I didn’t like bars. You saw a pretty girl reading a book and you say, ‘What are you reading?’ People would just talk in bookstores. It was a place to meet. Where do people meet now? More and more is done at home.”

In his first video on “Men and the Power of the Visual” for Prager University in October 2009, Dennis gives this story from his twenties: “I was approaching a red light. And the guy next to me said, ‘Look at that girl in the next car.’ I did and I bumped into the car in front of me.”

On Nov. 23, 2011, Dennis said: "When I was in my 20s, I met a terrific woman. I adored her. We had a wonderful relationship and time together. She said to me that she was very wary of charming men and that I was the first charming man she trusted."

On Nov. 11, 2010, Dennis said: “I had a girlfriend in graduate school, an attractive woman, who wanted to lose 10 pounds. I didn’t think she needed to. So she went on an ice cream diet and lost ten pounds.”

During college, Dennis regarded abortion as “a woman doing what she wants with her own body.” Over time, influenced by pro-life Christian activists, Dennis came to regard abortion as morally wrong in most instances (though he never came out for making it illegal in the first trimester of pregnancy). (April 26, 2010)

Dennis Goes To Leeds

In 1968, Prager won a junior-year-abroad scholarship after impressing interviewers with his skills in English, Hebrew, Russian and French. 

Max Prager wrote:

While Dennis was in his sophomore year at Brooklyn College, Marvin Kratter, a real estate developer who built apartment houses at the site of the old Ebbets Field, former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, created an annual scholarship for ONE student of the sophomore class at Brooklyn College called the Gideonse Foreign Study Scholarship. Harry D. Gideonse was the chancellor of the New School for Social Research and was the past president of Brooklyn College and Kratter wanted to honor him.
In addition to having good grades, and being held in high esteem of some of the teachers, students had to be interviewed by a panel of professors. Dennis, always having charisma and eloquence, was chosen to receive the $2,000 scholarship which covered sea transportation to and from any college in the world, tuition, and room and board.

Said Dennis in his January 2002 autobiography lecture:

I spent the first two years at Brooklyn College and I decided that now I will do schoolwork. I just had a feeling that it would be important for me to get decent grades at college. Well, this is the turning point of my life. They gave an award each year at Brooklyn College for one student for the junior year abroad scholarship.

You had to have a 3.0 GPA and I had a 3.01. Then you went through interviews. As soon as the interviews started, I knew I had a good chance because that was always my strong point, selling snow in winter.
Ohmigod, I’m going to have these professors interview me. When the final interview came about, there were about five candidates left. The heads of all the departments [were there]. That was to intimidate you but I loved it. I loved the attention. I remember sitting in a swivel chair and saying, yes professor, yes professor. I was eating it up.
They said, it says on your application that you speak Russian, French and Hebrew. Is that true?
I said yes, of course. So the head of the Russian department spoke to me in Russian and the head of the French department spoke to me in French and the head of the Hebrew department spoke to me in Hebrew. And then they said, tell us what they all said to you.
So, totally matter of fact as though it wasn’t effortful even though I was sweating inside, but I got it right and I knew I was going to get the award and I did.
We took a boat about a third the size of this on September 10, 1969. I was leaving Brooklyn for a whole year. There are no words to describe the joy on that boat.
I went to the University of Leeds in England. I would’ve gone anywhere.
Talk about seasick. The first day. It was very rough. It was like a giant ferry of a thousand students on it going for cheap to Europe. Everybody was nauseous. That was a lousy first day. Aside from that, it was a lot of fun.
Then romance began. I met a German girl on board. She became my girlfriend for much of that year in some ways which brought my home great joy. Dennis is dating a German girl. Bad enough that I was dating a non-Jewish girl. A German no less!
I visited her in Germany about five times that year. It was emotional. This was only 23 years after the Holocaust. I’m walking around Germany and I’m thinking about all the adults and wondered where were you? Who did you gas? Who did you roundup?

During my junior year in college, which I spent in Europe, and during which time I traveled from the Arctic to Morocco, I decided to experience life without the Jewish religious practices with which I was raised.
…I did not long for many of the observances. I hardly missed keeping kosher; being able to order and eat anything on a menu was a semi-ecstatic experience. And being able to do anything I wanted on Friday nights and Saturdays — go out, eat in restaurants, travel, shop — also seemed exhilarating and liberating. (Ultimate Issues, Jul – Sep, 1990, pg. 16)

On Friday night, August 1, 1969, Prager’s life forever changed. He’d ridden all day on a train from Lapland to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. He arrived around 11 p.m. As he got off the train, he realized it was Friday night. “…I felt as though I was losing the rhythm of life that I once had… Life was becoming biological; the holy and the distinct, and the day that let the other days have meaning and rhythm, were all disappearing.” (Ultimate Issues, Jul – Sep, 1990, pg. 16)

Christmas

“It’s a very personal autobiographical detail,” said Prager on his radio show Dec. 15, 2009, “but it really shook me up and began my odyssey toward who I am today. I was 20 years old when I went for my junior year to England. During the Christmas break, which was about three weeks, like most students in England, I left England for warmer weather. I crossed the English channel, took a train down the western part of Europe, then to the bottom of Spain and then took a boat to Morocco. This was on my own. This was a very adventurous trip. I was in Morocco for Christmas that year. To my amazement, because I monitor my own emotions a great deal. I have a lot of feedback. I’m very fortunate in that way. I realized what’s troubling me. I’m missing something. To my amazement, I didn’t immediately realize it, but I was missing the Christmas season. It was not Morocco’s fault. It’s a Muslim country. I couldn’t believe how I missed it.
“I was two years away from immersion in Jewish education. Of course I never had [Christmas], but it permeated my life. My parents, both Orthodox Jews, would watch the Christmas mass from Rome every Christmas eve. I loved it. My father, I and the Pope were all wearing yarmulkes.”

On his show Dec. 20, 2011, Dennis said, "It had a big impact on me which eventually expressed itself in such a wonderful relationship with Christians and to be the best I could a bridge between Jews and Christians... I miss this time so much that I do my best to not miss this time. I've been offered many times the opportunity to take listeners on a cruise during Christmas week but I don't want to miss this time."

Dennis Prager wrote in the Dec. 17, 2010 Jewish Journal:

How could I miss something that I never had? And being so Jewish, how could I miss the quintessential Christian holiday? It seemed religiously wrong, maybe even sinful.
…I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on this. It made little sense to me: Why would a yeshiva boy miss the Christmas season?
I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas — for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and “midwinter vacation,” as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December — this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.
And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.
…My youth in New York had consisted of an Orthodox home, Orthodox shul, Orthodox yeshiva, Orthodox friends and Orthodox Zionist summer camp in which only Hebrew was spoken and which was entirely Israel-oriented. Of course, I was an American, but how was I supposed to feel American?
…In that Orthodox world, American identity was not denigrated, just ignored. Anything Christian, however, was sometimes denigrated and always avoided…
…As the years passed, I not only made peace with my American identity and with my enjoyment of the Christmas season, I came to treasure that season and to fall in love with America and its distinct values (what I call the American Trinity: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum). While director of a Jewish institution — the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley — I volunteered to be a Santa Claus for the Simi Valley Rotary Club, of which I was a member. So, during the same week that I led Shabbat activities for a thousand Jews, I also went to my Rotary Club meeting (what is more American than the Rotary Club?), and I played Santa Claus at a local department store.
…When my yarmulke-wearing children were younger, I used to take them to see beautiful Christmas lights on homes.

The Soviet Union

After his tenure at Leeds, Dennis visited a friend on a kibbutz in Israel. He was introduced to a wealthy man who sponsored brief trips by young non-Israeli Jews to the Soviet Union to smuggle in Jewish religious items like prayer shawls, and smuggle out information about Russian Jews. It was 1969, two years after the USSR had broken off relations with Israel. 

Said Dennis in his January 2002 autobiography lecture:

I went to Israel in the Spring of 1969 for Passover. People who heard about me through friends, I was not famous at all, they heard he’s this Jewish boy who speaks Russian, Hebrew, English, let’s send him to Russia to bring in religious items for Jews since they’re all banned in the Soviet Union and let him bring out information such as names of people who want to get out, which was a risky thing to do under communism but when you’re 20 you think you’re immortal.
To make it even more alluring, not only were they going to pay for me to go to Russia to do this for four weeks, it was the longest four weeks of my life, they were going to send me with a girl from England. With my luck, she was very religious and believed there should be no touching prior to marriage. I had no chance.
I cried the whole flight on Pan Am coming from Moscow back to New York in October 1969. I’ll never forget the stewardess coming over and saying, ‘Can I help you? Did you just break up with a girlfriend?’ I said 'No, it’s OK. I can’t explain.'
The explanation was that I had just spent four weeks in a totalitarian state and because I had this blue passport I could get out and I met all these people who couldn’t. And I was crying for all the people who couldn’t get out.

...I became the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, one of the most effective organizations for Soviet Jews in the world.
As such, I spoke before synagogues of every denomination, Hadassah groups, Jewish federations, Jewish groups on college campuses. If there was a Jewish organization, it cared about the plight of Soviet Jews. For decades, virtually every synagogue in America had a “Save Soviet Jewry” sign in front of it.
Over time, the plight of the Soviet Jews awakened me to the plight of all Soviet dissidents, whether secular ones — such as that great man, the physicist Andrei Sakharov — or Christian.
The latter were particularly persecuted. Though my work was with Soviet Jewry, I had no trouble acknowledging that Soviet Christians often had it worse. Few Soviet Jews were killed or locked away in dungeon-like conditions by the Soviet authorities, but Soviet Christians were.
At some point in my early years, it dawned on me that I had not seen a single church with a “Save Soviet Christians” sign. Even more amazingly, I encountered Christian clergy — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox — at every one of the scores of Soviet Jewry rallies at which I spoke. But while these wonderful Christians were outspoken on behalf of Soviet Jews, they were nearly all silent regarding — or even simply ignorant of — the dire plight of Soviet Christians.

But, the star of the West was the representative of Bnai Brith Hillel, Dennis Prager, 21, of Brooklyn. Challenging the Soviets, Prager led a spontaneous walkout of the Peace Commission when the Moscow-Cairo group, couched by members of their regular UN delegations, refused to allow Vietnamese and Chinese participants to speak.
Prager suddenly rose, 6’4” tall, and above the din of the desk-pounding cried out that all who wanted to protest the violation of democratic principles should follow him out of the room. About 30 did so. Although their actions did not necessarily reflect political sympathy with those who were excluded, under Prager’s leadership, they effectively demonstrated their commitment to the democratic way.
The next morning Prager appeared at the Education Commission and delivered a speech on the cultural deprivations suffered by Soviet Jewry. Back in the Peace Commission, he participated in an exchange which earned for him the reputation as the only man to embarrass the Russians.
At noon a day later, Prager called a press conference at which he presented a declaration signed by 40 delegations protesting “the cynical attempts to manipulate the conference by representatives of the Soviet-East European bloc and representatives of the undemocratic left.” During the final plenary debate, Prager withstood the threats and jeers of the Moscow-Cairo mob and demanded a vote on the validity of their one-sided Peace Commission report. When that was denied, the Jewish students worked to insert an amendment in the Soviet inspired final message to the UN General Assembly. Their single success came when the plenum, by a vote of 271-115 agreed to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and demand the restoration of democracy to that country.

...the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard's hilarious 1972 article "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult"), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle's hilarious 2005 article "Desperately Seeking Susan"), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article "What Leo Strauss Was Up To" by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).

So you had all these wild-eyed, charismatic, brilliant people, suddenly without the compression of traditional life. What to do with all that fire and brilliance? Answer: Marx, Freud, civil rights, etc...

All of which does make me ever-so-slightly sympathetic to the idea that these brilliant Jews give out advice that's almost designed to cripple the people it's given to. All the while claiming it's for everyone's good, and charging a pretty penny for doing so. I could never accuse them of being anything but well-meaning. But I had to learn to see through the posing, the fiery eyes, and the preaching....

Many of the Jewish radical kids went on to do very well for themselves.

The next year [senior year at Brooklyn College] I began lecturing and that’s why my life turned around. I went all around the Eastern half of the United States lecturing on the plight of Soviet Jews.
I spent many trips to Eastern Europe visiting communist countries. I lived with families in Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary. I was in Czechoslovakia the year after the Soviet invasion and you could still see all the massive gigantic artillery holes in the walls in Prague. It just made me hate communism more.
Three years into lecturing for free, giving all the proceeds over to the Free Soviet Jewry movement, my friend Joseph Telushkin said to me, Dennis, you have to start lecturing on other things and making a living.
And so I called up a Jewish place [a Hadassah in Queens] I had spoke to. I said, “Hi, this is Dennis Prager. I’m the kid who went to Russia and gave a speech.” The woman said, “Yeah, you were terrific.”
I said, “I’d like to come back and give a speech on another topic.”
And the woman said, “What else do you know?”
It was perfectly appropriate. I had no reputation other than being an expert in Soviet Jews.
I said, “How would you like to know why most young Jews are alienated from Judaism?”
She said, “Yeah. We would love to know that. Do you know why?”
I said, “I think I do because I’m a young Jew and I’m not alienated.”
She said, “How much do you charge?”
I was so nervous. There was never a time in my life when I was more nervous. I can’t ask for me well.
I was about to say $35 when Telushkin said, $75. So I said $75 expecting to hear it was too much.
She of course went, $75, that’s like free. She said that’s fine. They even paid my taxi fare. It was the first time people paid me to come to their place to give a talk. And it hasn’t stopped. It’s a wonderful way to make a living.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, without anyone expressly defining it, I knew what a man was supposed to be. And I knew that society, not to mention my parents, expected me to be one. It went without explicitly saying so that I would have to make a living, support myself as soon as possible and support a family thereafter.
When I acted immaturely, I was told to be or act like a man.

“My graduate work was done in Soviet studies. I read Pravda almost every day. There was an interesting debate at the time and I may have been wrong.
“The debate was — was the Soviet Union a continuation of Russian civilization or was it a communist abrupt change of course? I argued that it was overwhelmingly an abrupt change of course brought about by the communists. When I see Russia today once again moving towards dictatorship, where journalists are murdered if they report things that disturb the government, when you see what is controlled by Putin’s party United Russia, which effectively controls regional governments, prosecutors’ offices, courts, police departments, and election commissions. They control the media.
“There were those who said that the Soviet Union, Stalin, Lenin, these were not aberrations thrust upon a Russian civilization but rather a continuum, obviously worse than anything that preceded it.
“I said no. This was just communism shoved into the face of the Russian people and I may have been wrong. The love of liberty does not appear to beat strongly in the Russian soul.” (Dec. 15, 2010)

[Michael] Oren—who changed his name from Bornstein when he made aliyah, though he retained it as his middle name, in deference to his father—and [Dore] Gold met for the first time at the Bayit, at a guest lecture by an Israeli author. They soon connected with Sokoloff, Fine, Cohen and others at the Bayit’s weekly Shabbat dinners and educational seminars. Eventually, they both moved in. They were joined by a remarkable cast of future Jewish luminaries who frequented the Bayit in the mid-1970s. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic lived there there, as did Rabbi Joseph Teluskhin, the Jewish author. J.J. Goldberg, a former editor-in-chief of the Forward, lived at a different Jewish collective, but he spent time at the Bayit.

I attended antiwar rallies. I was very anti-communist but I did not believe that this was the place to make the stand. Even at the demonstrations, I felt no kinship with anyone else there because they were celebrating Ho Chi Minh. We weren’t villains. He was the villain. The North Vietnamese communists were villains. Here I am again alone. They’re going ‘Ho, ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh,’ and I’m thinking the man is vile. All communist dictators are vile.
So alone on the drugs. Alone on the attitudes. Alone on the politics. Alone on the music. I didn’t care for the music of that era. To me it was usually very self-referential. My angst type of music. Sit there with the guitar and talk about how life has screwed you up is how I heard a lot of that music. There was nothing I had in common.
And then there was dating. Here I am a Columbia university graduate student and the most logical woman to date would be a Barnard student but it was virtually impossible because they were so feminist. We had nothing in common. They thought they were the same as man. I’ve always believed men and women are very different. I had very few comfortable moments of dating [with women from New York].
I was doing a lot of lecturing around the Eastern half of the United States so I met women who did believe that men and women were different in St. Louis and in Columbus and in Miami so I ended up having a girlfriend in St. Louis, in Miami, which is not such a terrible thing that time of life.
Another reason that I was out of sync with my generation was that I was religious.
I wrote a paper comparing Marxism with Judaism for a professor who was a Marxist secular Jew, which said I had guts. I expected a D. He was kind enough to give it a B-. It was clear I annoyed him. I said that Judaism was far superior to Marxism as a moral philosophy.
There was fun in being single in that time of the sexual revolution where after 12,000 years of men trying women now said they could have sex as unemotionally as men could and I thanked G-d I was born in that rare time when women could delude themselves into believing something so stupid.

Girls at Barnard, if they go on a date with you, they felt that they were giving in to the enemy. Shaving? Forget about it. To shave was to smack of bourgeois imperialist neo-fascistic thinking.
Thank G-d I started lecturing publicly at an early age, so it took me out of Manhattan frequently. I did all my dating in the Mid-West. I had dates Indiana, Chicago. The Jewish women of Manhattan were so feminist that you felt like you were on a war footing when you went on a date.
The age old difference that men were desirous of sexual relations without commitment just for the sake of the great joy of the physical contact, this was induced by society, women could do the same thing. I remember feeling wonderful that these girls believed that. Men had been trying to convince women of that for 42,000. That’s the oldest line in the history of male-female relations — hey, you don’t need commitment You’ll love it!
These brilliant idiots from Columbia were saying, that’s right. We can have as empty sex as you. It took us ethical guys off the hook. We were almost unethical if we did not offer them the opportunity to express their equality. It turns out that they were fooling themselves. Men were having their usual ball of using women’s bodies for pleasure.
…I remember in my real dating days, I would interview women. …I was always shocked that they would not ask me reciprocal questions. Aren’t you curious about men? I’m terribly curious about women.

Another feature of Dennis is that he is always looking for the bigger truth. Nothing can ever just happen to him, there's a major lesson to be learned. For example, Dennis as a young man liked to date. A lot. His relations though for a long period of time tended to be short and inevitably I would get a phone call. 'I broke up with so and so.' Why? 'I realized that she really wasn't a warm person and I realize now that warmth is the most important trait in a woman.' A month later. 'I broke up.' Why? 'No sense of humor. Humor really matters. It's hard to be with someone who is humorless.' Two weeks later. 'I broke up. Not sharp intellectually.' A week later. 'Not concerned with moral issues.' Six weeks later. 'I broke up with so-and-so.' I said, 'I know why.' He said, 'How can you know why? You've never met her.' I said, 'I know that whatever trait she's missing is the most important trait in a woman.'

Since entering graduate school, I was preoccupied with this question: Why did so many learned and intelligent professors believe so many foolish things?
…One day, I received an answer to these questions. Seemingly out of nowhere, a biblical verse — one that I had recited every day in kindergarten at the Jewish religious school I attended as a child — entered my mind. It was a verse from Psalm 111: “Wisdom begins with fear of God.”
The verse meant almost nothing to me as a child — both because I recited it in the original Hebrew, which at the time I barely understood, and because the concept was way beyond a child’s mind to comprehend. But 15 years later, a verse I had rarely thought about answered my puzzle about my university and put me on a philosophical course from which I have never wavered.
…Since that day at Columbia, however, I regularly renew my faith through the back door — I see the confusion and nihilism that godless ideas produce and my faith is restored. The consequences of secularism have been at least as powerful a force for faith in my life as religion.

In the overview course half the students were Yeshiva high school graduates who thought they’d get an easy ‘A’ taking this basic Jewish history course. Unfortunately, for them, however, I was not about to give easy ‘A’s’ to Yeshiva guys. I wanted them to learn and be challenged by Judaism.
I’ll never forget this story because I got into some hot water. A lot of them were quite Orthodox, so I said one day in class, “If you have been keeping Kosher since you were a child, in other words, your entire life, and have never ever deviated from it, I suggest that you go out and have a ham sandwich. And you should continue having ham sandwiches until you enjoy them. Then go back to keeping Kosher because in the meantime you are not refusing to eat ham out of any understanding of Kashrut but because you think ham is disgusting.” (Ultimate Issues, Spring-Summer 1986, pg. 16)

On his radio show Nov. 4, 2010, Dennis said: “Young kids look up to you. Pretty girls look up to you. What else can you ask for? I taught college [Jewish history at the City University of New York and at Brooklyn College]. I know what it feels like except I didn’t take myself as seriously as the others because I knew what a bubble it was. I had the same accolades and the same young kids looking up to me. I was three years older than they were. I couldn’t believe it. It was like nirvana.”

On his radio show Oct. 19, 2011, Dennis said he never went to teacher's college. "A degree in teaching? I taught college and I taught high school. I taught well and the kids loved me and they came to my class. I made an announcement to kids on the first day, 'You don't want to come to class? That's fine with me. It is my task to make it so interesting that you will want to come. If you pass the test, you pass the test. You want to cut, cut. I'm not taking attendance.' My classes were over-subscribed."

Around 1970, Prager’s car was broken into and the stereo stolen. He filed a police report. Two officers stopped by his apartment to make a report. Dennis opened his door. The officers looked around and said, “Holy s—. Did they do a job.” (Dec. 28, 2006)

"I kept it clean but it was spectacularly messy. There were a lot of newspapers around. Do you know what I did before a woman came to my apartment? Do you know how much I would cover? I remember putting blankets on piles of newspapers." (Mar. 8, 2013)

On his show Jan. 26, 2011, Dennis said: “Taking care of a home is a good thing. When you have an apartment, somebody else takes care of it.”
“When I went to graduate school in Manhattan, I lived in the apartment next door to the super[intendent]. When I wanted something done, I told the kid, ‘Tell your father to come over.’ It worked like a charm. The kid loved me.
“I wonder if that kid who’s now middle-aged remembers me? Do we remember the adults who come into our lives and becomes something for two years?
“That kid would come over and I would play Beethoven for the kid. I love little boys. I actually well up with emotion taking care of a little boy. I never raised a little girl so I don’t know.
“I took care of the superintendent’s kid so much that I had an in.”
On June 2, 2011, Dennis said: “I remember in the ’60s, ’70s, how so many of my fellow baby boomers were doing things to find themselves. I remember thinking, ‘I never lost myself so there’s nothing to find.' I never looked for myself. I looked for what was meaningful in life. Then Dennis would attach himself to meaning and build a life. I believed deeply in making a family and joining a community. I wasn’t given Dennis. I was given a set of values.”

Dennis Prager wrote Aug. 18, 2009:

When I was a graduate student at Columbia University in the early 1970s, I came to the then-tentative conclusion that I would probably never encounter a morally weaker, more cowardly group of people than college administrators.
…What prompted this conclusion in the 1970s was seeing a handful of radical students take over classrooms at Columbia and shut down the university while professors and deans, individuals whose lives were supposedly dedicated to the open mind and to learning, did nothing. It is almost impossible for me, nearly four decades later, to fully convey how deeply this affected me.
I came to see the modern university as fraudulent. In theory it stood for learning and opening the mind. In practice it stood for appeasement of bullies.

When I began traveling at the age of 20, I had one great goal in mind: I never wanted to hear the name of a place in the news and not be able to relate to it. Let’s be honest. Until you go to India or Honduras, they are abstractions. One can major in Indian history or Latin American studies, but two days in one of those countries makes that country more real than four years of reading about it.
One of life’s great moral challenges is to see the stranger as fully real. While travel does not guarantee that one will see all others as fully real — the father of modern Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, spent two years in America in the late 1940s and left seeing Americans as caricatures of decadence — it is very hard to do so without travel.
You also learn a lot about life. For example, I learned very early on, in the first of my four visits to India, that poverty was not the cause of crime I was taught it was at college. In fact, aside from abject, starvation-level poverty, it is not even the main cause of human unhappiness. In most of the poor places of the world, children seem considerably less jaded and laugh more easily than many American children.
I learned more about Islam in a week in Egypt than in two years at Columbia’s Middle East Institute. When the pretty young Egyptian waitress at the Nile Hilton in 1974 told me to read the Koran because once I did, I would become a Muslim, I realized that secularism was not, my professors notwithstanding, the wave of the Middle East’s future, and I understood how Muslims view the Koran and the non-Muslim world. When I offered to buy a beer for the Egyptian taxi driver who took me from Cairo to the pyramids on a very hot day, he politely declined, explaining that as a Muslim, he is not permitted to drink alcohol. I asked why he thought the ban was necessary. Because, he explained, if a man drinks and then goes home and sees his daughter lying in bed, bad things could ensue. That opened this 25-year-old’s eyes.
...After visits to about a dozen African countries, I came to realize that the spread of Christianity holds the best hope for that sad continent...
And I came to realize the overwhelming power of cultural values. How else to explain “honor killings,” the subverting of the most powerful instinct in the world — to protect one’s child — except through an understanding of the power of culture?

In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc., provided they are not accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice, are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most enormous crimes.

In traditional Western cultures, below the rank of aristocrats, romantic and sexual impulsiveness was a major threat to social standing. The punishment in terms of class standing for out-of-wedlock births was so harsh that the illegitimacy rate among women in England in 1200-1800 was stable at around 3-4%, even though women didn't marry on average until age 24 to 26.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, which hit home in the 1970s, disrupted this traditional system of social sanctions...

And yet ... the old logic that children need two parents to have the best chance to succeed in life still plays out even though we aren't supposed to mention it.

So, by removing social indoctrination of the masses, the post-Sexual Revolution system selects even more than the earlier system for social success by individuals who are intelligent and cold-blooded. In contrast, people of impulsive temperaments and less ability to foresee the consequences of giving into their impulses are now much more on their own with far less guidance from the culture. Thus, the people in the upper reaches of society are increasingly of what you might call a Swedish or Swiss personality (or are Asian immigrants whose families never took seriously the 1960s).

But nobody is supposed to notice that publicly. So, the top level of our society continues to argue for the breaking down of old restrictions, whether on the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman or that their should be limits on debt and interest rates. After all, individualistic self-determination works fine for the upper middle class.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution look like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles...

What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans.

We'd each write different chapters and then critique each other. Dennis did most of the editing and he was a good editor. He claimed my style was too anecdotal, with too many digressions, took too long to make a point. Dennis loved to enumerate though the points he was making and if he'd had the book written the way he wanted, it really wouldn't have been a conventional book, it would've been a manual. For example, one of the questions was -- Who needs Jewish law/organized religion?
So this is how Dennis would've answered it: "There are 16 reasons which I will now enumerate A-P on why we need organized religion. Reason A: We need organized religion because religion isn't only concerned with affecting the individual but affecting society as a whole. There are nine reasons why religion wants to affect society, which I will now enumerate in roman numerals. Reason one is because people can't be trusted to be good on their own. There are nine reasons why people can't be trusted to be good on their own, which I will now enumerate."

We sent the manuscript to the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPS), hoping they would publish it. I received a call from an editor at JPS who told me that they would not publish the book. I asked her why, and her answer taught me a great deal about Jewish life: “Because it is too advocative,” she said.
I was stunned. The Jewish Publication Society of America refused to publish a Jewish book on the grounds that it was “too advocative” of Judaism?
As it turned out, that rejection was a blessing. Joseph and I published the book on our own and sold so many copies that we lived off the sales of the book at lectures for years. Later Simon and Schuster published the book.
I came to realize that the JPS refusal to publish a book that was advocative of Judaism was symbolic of much of Jewish life. It seemed that almost no one outside of Orthodoxy was advocating Judaism (and even in Orthodoxy at that time, Chabad was largely alone in doing so and not nearly as well-known as it is today).

Some rabbis take pains to keep people in the dark about Jewish traditions of Heaven and Hell. For example, a popular guide to Jewish belief, Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, tells readers that the "notion of hell where sinners suffer eternally is foreign to Judaism and entered the Western world's religious consciousness through the New Testament." Its authors...have chosen their words carefully. Talmudic discussions about Hell do indeed agree that the average sinner remains in Hell for a limited period of time (typically either eleven or twelve months) before going to Heaven. However, some Talmud sages taught that other sinners remain in Hell forever.

There was a humanistic synagogue. In my more firebrand years, I am mellow compared to what I was 20 years ago, I would walk into gladiatorial combat with anyone. I remember going to Detroit to debate the founder of Humanistic Judaism, a rabbi in Birmingham [Sherwin T. Wine], Michigan.
I’ve come close to knowing what it is like to go in the ring with trainers behind you massaging you and getting you ready with towels and a bucket of water. This evening had thousands of Jews coming to scream on the one they were rooting for — the humanist or the religious one. I had my backers. He had his backers. It was like a prize fight. It bothered me in some way. I don’t think anyone came to be enlightened but just to see major gladiatorial combat.
Do you know what he did in his synagogue? They would get together Friday night. And do you know what they would read? Philip Roth. They had a Torah — it was in the library.

I have to leave because I’m giving a lecture in the [San Francisco] Bay Area very early in the morning. I’ve been lecturing since I was 21. I made a living lecturing and selling my books at my lectures.
I said, why don’t I bring my book to my lecture in the morning? And then I realized that I’m not as hungry as I was in my 20s. I used to shlep cartons of hardcover books to every lecture I gave. I worked like crazy just hauling books on airplanes and off airplanes and into rent-a-cars to my speech to make another $100 or $100. I don’t do that shlepping now.

In a lecture on Deut. 7:9-26, Dennis said: “Anybody who allows himself to feel everything is sometimes quite angry at God. You see horrible evil and suffering on earth, you don’t get angry at God? It happened to me. I don’t have this as much now, but in my younger day I had a whole panoply of emotions towards God.
“I’ll never forget an afternoon of the eve of Yom Kippur, and I’m thinking about Yom Kippur, and I hear on the radio about some kids who have this syndrome where they just cut themselves. They just mutilate themselves. It hit me terribly. I thought, maybe this Yom Kippur, God should ask us for our forgiveness. And that thought unfortunately did not leave me.”

Life Of Brian (1979)

The Crowd: Yes! We’re all individuals!
Brian: You’re all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I’m not…
The Crowd: Sch!
Dennis: “That’s one of the brilliant scenes from that movie. I know it disturbs some religious people, but I believe that we need to have a sense of humor about our religions and that God would laugh along with us.” (Jan. 22, 2010)
Dennis Prager reminds me of Jesus Christ. Both came from non-prestigious communities (Nazareth and Brooklyn). Both had solid if unspectacular Jewish educations. Both started public speaking at a young age (Jesus in the temple at age 12, and Dennis in the temples at age 21 speaking on Soviet Jewry). Both preached a simple version of Judaism that gave greater weight to ethics than ritual. Both preached with messianic fervor and moved thousands (Dennis autographs Bibles, I’m not sure if Jesus did that). Both were not known for their humility (Jesus claimed to be God’s son and Dennis said his contributions wouldn’t be recognized for a millenia). Both were largely rejected by the Jewish leaders of their day. Both had non-prestigious professions (carpenter and talkshow host). Both had devoted followings among the common people while the intellectuals despised them.
On Sept. 14, 2010, Dennis said Airplane! (1980) is one of the three funniest films ever.
In a speech Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said: “The two funniest genres of humor in my life have been Soviet dissident jokes and American lawyer jokes. …Bitterness causes humor. Happy people are not that funny. If you look at comedians’ lines, they are generally miserable. Lawyers cause misery here and the Soviets caused there. I’m generalizing. There are lawyers here who don’t cause misery. Yeah, there are.”

South Africa

On Dec. 6, 2013, Dennis said: "To those with ambivalence about Nelson Mandela... There is a reason for his greatness -- Zimbabwe. You had a Rhodesian white apartheid government overthrown as it was in South Africa and you ended up with sheer misery for the vast majority of its citizens. A bread basket was turned into one of the poorest places on earth... South Africa could've been Zimbabwe. He could've cultivated anger."

"I haven't spoken about apartheid almost ever. I wrote about it. I visited South Africa in my 20s [during the 1970s]. I debated, would I go to South Africa? Anybody with a conscience was opposed to apartheid."

"I remember how I felt. I wrote it home. I felt when I got there, there was a certain jolt to my system. I was always strong-willed. I saw two bathrooms. One said 'Europeans Only' and the other one said 'Colored.' I remember thinking, 'I want to go into the Colored.' I didn't. I went into the Europeans and I felt dirty. I felt like I had compromised."

"I then traveled to Kenya and I felt more normal in a black society than I did in an apartheid society. It was a bad system."

"It stayed with me. It gnawed at me. I've always wondered. Did I do the right thing? Should I have gone into the colored? I would've done it as a statement of my anger, not because it would've accomplished anything. It has always hung in the background of my conscience. Did I facilitate something I knew to be bad?"

If you look at average life expectancy, it plunged by a decade after the end of apartheid in South Africa. In 2013, the average life expectancy in these two countries of South Africa and Zimbabwe was less than a year apart, but so long as we feel good about ourselves for ending apartheid, just so long as don't have to soil our consciences by using separate bathrooms, who cares, right, if Africans die?

Dennis apparently did not pause before going to any communist country as he did before traveling to apartheid South Africa.

Feb. 17, 2014, Dennis said: "Blacks really needed a Civil Rights movement. There was something terrible called Jim Crow. There was real genuine racism and genuine non-racism... Since then, all status acccrues from being a victim. If you can be a member of some victim communities... WASP males made the best country in the world."

At the end of 2013, Duck Dynasty reality TV star Phil Robertson got in trouble for saying about the Jim Crow era: "I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."

The black family in America pre-Civil Rights was in better shape than today. As the black economist Walter Williams wrote:

In 1960, only 28 percent of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were never married. Today, it’s 56 percent. In 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 percent, in 1960, 22 percent, and today, it’s 70 percent. Some argue that the state of the black family is the result of the legacy of slavery, discrimination and poverty. That has to be nonsense. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families, comprised of two parents and children. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents. 

Dennis Prager Moves To Los Angeles In 1976

On July 10, 2009, Dennis said: “I was a kid in my twenties. I’d never been to Los Angeles. I remember I came out to give a talk. I remember standing at the American Airlines terminal at JFK [airport in New York] and I saw the flight number and then I saw ‘Los Angeles.’ I don’t think there were five times in my life when I was as excited as I was to get a on a plane to go to Los Angeles. It’s one of those times when you can cry.”
Said Dennis in January 2002: “I remember the first time I was brought to L.A., I was 24 years old, to give a lecture. I remember it so vividly. I rented a car and I was driving down palm-tree lined Wilshire Blvd and saying to myself, ‘Dennis, if you are not the luckiest man in the world, I wonder who is? Here I am being paid to come to Southern California’, another romantic vision in my life.
“By this time I knew I was going to leave New York. I knew I was going to leave New York the day I was in another city.
“My first speech out of town was Nashville, Tennessee.”
On his radio show July 30, 2010, Dennis said: “When I have read or been told about any of the Leo characteristics, it has struck me that I fit pretty well. The people I know, fit pretty well.”
“When I moved out to LA from New York [his last address was in Whitestone, Queens], it was the first time in my life that someone said, ‘What’s your sign?’ I had no idea what they were talking about.”
In April, 1976, Shlomo Bardin, the 76-year old founder and director of the Brandeis Institute, invited the 26-year old Prager to take charge. “He announced I’d be his successor and died that week.”
Said Dennis in January 2002: “I was the youngest speaker to ever come to the Brandeis Institute to lecture. They brought me out five more times.”
“I was in Mississippi giving a lecture and I got a call [relaying that Shlomo Bardin had died]. ‘Come on out. You’re going to speak at the funeral.’
“I cried like a baby. I could not give the eulogy without constantly crying. And I was crying for me as much as for him. I wasn’t ready for such responsibility. The only job I had held before this was as a waiter at summer camp.
“I came out to LA with a cot, a piano, an accordion and a few thousand books. I lived at the institute. I lived in Simi Valley for three years at this 3,200 acre retreat. When I was dating, it was very powerful. ‘Would you like to see my place?’ It was 3,200 acres. That was better than partying to make an impact.”
Rabbi Telushkin served as Education Director.
Max Prager wrote: “Dennis also engaged our nephew, Elliot Prager, as Social Director.”
In 1976, Prager was interviewed on television for the first time. He was asked by KNBC about what he was trying to achieve at Brandeis-Bardin.
“We’re trying to turn out leaders,” Prager said.
“Why?”
“Because a society without leaders is a leaderless society.” (Radio show, Jan. 24, 2006)

On his show Nov. 21, 2012, Dennis said: "In my late 20s, a bunch of young people in their late 20s worked for me. They said it was hard for them to believe that Dennis was as happy as he acts. There must be something underneath. We need to loosen his inhibitions. They said, 'We want you to smoke a joint.' I said, I can't because I can't inhale. They said, 'OK, we're going to bake it into a brownie.' I said, 'OK, bake it into a brownie and let's see what happens to me.'

"I have a lot of the brownie. They baked like a month's worth. It was like one part chocolate to 76 parts  marijuana to test what Dennis is really like. I did feel it. I was in a semi-euphoric mood but all it was was more of me. All I did was talk and make jokes. They were waiting for all these terrible things to come out from my inner being and nothing did. I was just unstoppably verbose.

"The next morning, I felt horrible. It was a one-time thing. I was curious, what's beneath what you say? And beneath of what you see is more of what you see.

"I've always had pain in my life. My childhood was not particularly happy. Once I got in my teens, I got happier. I don't have a bright memory of my childhood, but the underlying person, certainly in my late 20s, a particularly happy time in my life, was what they heard."

"I can't stand marijuana. I can't stand drugs. You have to get high on life. You should be able to get high on friends, on love, on sex, on music and art and travel. I always looked at drugs as a statement that I am jaded. I can't experience real pleasure within life itself."

On a CSPAN BookTV interview April 21, 2013, Dennis said: "If my child had gone to a Let's Celebrate Legalized Marijuana [rally], I would believe I had failed as a parent utterly. The narcissism involved there. That's what preoccupies you? You are now free to get high on marijuana?"

"Yes, I do want government to outlaw marijuana. I am not an anarchist. This notion that if you're for small government, then you're for no government, I've never bought. Yes, there are things that are [illegal such as marijuana] that I would like to continue to see [stay illegal]. I don't want any new bans. If marijuana had been legal for the past 50 years, I would've said nothing."

On July 18, 2012, Dennis said: "I worked with very rich people. The first salary I received. My board of directors were almost all businessmen and they were in for the details. The president of the institute, who is no longer with us, would call at 9 a.m. to make sure that I was in at 9 a.m.. That I tripled the membership of the institute, tripled its revenue, brought a thousand people to the institute on weekends, traveled 45 miles to get to the institute, that didn't matter. Was I in the office at 9 a.m.? It was irrelevant that I was in at the office at 9 a.m., the work I did was with the people. But he was a tree man. I think he was a developer of parking lots." 

In a lecture on Deut. 15, Dennis said: “The work that I had in my late 20s brought me into contact with truly wealthy people. I never met truly wealthy people growing up in Brooklyn. Very wealthy was if you had an Oldsmobile. I would meet some of them [at Brandeis-Bardin] and it was clear they did not run their businesses [ethically]. And I learned that when you cheat, you assume that everybody is cheating you. Everybody is as crappy as I am. If you go through life like that, you can’t have anybody as a friend. And then you are lonely and that’s the worst punishment of all. You go through life in solitary confinement.”

In a column Dec. 6, 2005, Dennis wrote: “After the first two summers [at Brandeis-Bardin], I began to play a game with myself. On the first night of the session, I made a mental note of which women I thought the most attractive and compared that list to one I made after the four weeks. The names on the latter list were rarely on the first-night list.”
On June 22, 2010, Dennis said: “We had a one-month session…to teach kids Judaism. I inherited from the man who founded it and he had a rule for that one month — you could not pair off. Same-sex friendships of course. But he did not want romance for the one-month they were there and I supported that completely. And I was very strict on the rule. It was opposite sex only. It was to prevent a breakdown of the system into who loves who and who’s breaking up with who.”
In a lecture on Lev. 18 in 2008, Dennis said: "I had a boy [at Brandeis-Bardin] and he attended the month-course in the summer for boys and girls 19-25. They lived there. He came over one day. He was bereft because he was attracted to men and didn't want to be. He wanted to follow the Torah and he wanted to love a woman. It became clear to me then if it wasn't clear to me earlier the notion that everyone has a choice in this matter is untenable. You have a choice in how you act but you don't have a choice in what you gravitate to. I have deep sympathy for the homosexual who wants to take the Bible seriously."
On June 8, 2010, Dennis said: “I was single. When I taught Judaism, I taught that the ideal was to marry. I remember saying over and over — I have not met Judaism’s ideal. I don’t think I should be fired because I haven’t, but I should be fired if I deny that the ideal is to marry.” 
“I can testify that groupies don’t hang out with Torah teachers,” said Dennis in his 17th lecture on Deuteronomy (2005). “This is the price I’ve paid since an early age — the wrong profession… It was never a great pickup line in my single days. So what do you do? I lecture on ethical room. Oooh, I’m in room 207.”
“I do believe that God guides me.”
In a lecture on Deut. 22:12, Dennis said: “Virginity is a big deal in most societies. Virginity not mattering is new in human history and isolated to the Western world. I am not a great virginity valuer. It was not one of the things I put in my singles ads — ‘Only virgins respond please!’ I am a modern.”
“Broken hymen-induced blood on a sheet is not my favorite form of aesthetic stimulation.”

The Brandeis-Bardin Institute from 1977-1983 was an example of what a community run by Dennis Prager would look like. By most accounts, it was a success.

Said Dennis in a 1997 lecture on honoring parents (Exodus 20):

I was at a speech and a woman came over to me and she said, ‘Dennis, I read your books and I got involved in Judaism and let me show you the product of my involvement. I am working on this whole syllabus on how children can obey their parents.’ It was frightening. I thought to myself, I wish I never wrote that book.
It’s funny when people get influenced by you and then they do things you would never in a thousand years want them to do. That’s why I’m not starting a new movement. You can’t control those who you think you’ve influenced.

While running BBI, Prager was a strict disciplinarian who kicked out students who broke the rules. Prager ejected musician Sam Glaser for playing non-Jewish music. Another college student, a philosophy major from Berkeley, was tossed for raising disruptive challenges. 

Dennis was a confident teacher who ejected anyone who got in the way of his mission. Authority felt natural to him. He was tall, popular and passionate. When he walked into a room, people took notice, and it took great strength to oppose him.

Not happy with oversight, Prager chafed under the BBI board, frequently regarding it with contempt. Many on the board returned his hostility.
In his speeches since working at BBI, Prager mocks his old board. He tells one story of wanting to do singles weekends. Prager says the board was shocked. What would we talk about? Prager said that knowing how the board thought, he told them he’d take a week or two to study the matter. Then Prager returned to the board and said they’d done a study and found that the brains of single people were very similar to the brains of married people. Therefore, Prager proposed a similar curricula – study of Judaism. 
BBI hosted college students who would often put on skits. Shortly before taking charge, Prager witnessed one skit that was deliberately filled with the sounds of flatulence. Prager decided that once he took charge, all student skits would have to be cleared before performance to make sure they upheld Jewish norms.
“[H]aving been a camp counselor and camp director for ten years,” Prager wrote on page four of his 1995 book Think a Second Time, “I know that few things come more naturally to many children than meanness, petty cruelty, bullying, and a lack of empathy for less fortunate peers. Visit any bunk of thirteen-year-olds in which one camper is particularly fat, short, clumsy, or emotionally or intellectually disadvantaged, and you are likely to observe cruelty that would shock an adult.”
In a lecture on Lev. 19:12-16 in 2008, Dennis said: "When I paid lecturers [at Brandeis-Bardin], I brought dozens and dozens of lecturers, I paid them before they spoke. They came for the weekend and I paid them Friday afternoon. And I saw their faces. It seemed so classy on my part, on the institute's part, to do that. I inherited that from the predecessor... This is why I'm for good religion."

On July 17, 2013, Dennis said: "Parents would thank me: 'You had such a great impact on my children.' I remember saying to my dear friend at the time, 'I hope that my kids will have a Dennis Prager in their lives.' I knew that I wouldn't be Dennis Prager in my own children's eyes. That's the way it works. Hearing things from an outsider often is more powerful because the emotional baggage that a child and parent have is absent when it is a third party."

This was an era when there were few obstacles to a teacher dating his college-aged students. 

In September of 1983, Prager left the Brandeis Bardin Institute. He wrote: “While the membership and I loved each other, the heads of the board of directors and I did not. Indeed, I left BBI largely because the president/chairman of the board [William Chotiner] made life miserable for me. I occasionally reflect on where my life would be today had he and others of the lay leadership treated me differently.” (Prager CD)
On his radio show Dec. 3, 2010, Dennis said: “There were very serious problems with the board of directors. A friend of mine [Joseph Telushkin?] came in to my office at this institute and he walked in as I was looking at my stamp collection. I haven’t seen the collection in about 20 years. He told one of our mutual friends, ‘Do I envy Dennis! You should have seen how distracted that stamp collection made him. He was able to leave his problems and concentrate on the stamps.”
Joseph Telushkin wrote on page 104 of his book Jewish Humor about Prager and Brandeis-Bardin:

Several years ago, a friend of mine, who had directed a major Jewish institution in California, was considering running for the U.S. Congress. He met with a powerful Democratic congressman from Los Angeles [Henry Waxman?], himself a very committed and active Jew, who advised him in all seriousness: “If you’ve survived the political infighting in Jewish life for ten years, when you make it to Congress, you’ll find the atmosphere there much gentler.”

At the time of Bardin’s death, [Prager] was 27 years old. According to Dr. Victor Goodhill, a former institute vice-president, “He was almost a small, younger Shlomo.”
Prager, now a talk show host for KABC radio, says that Bardin had actually asked him to succeed him as director of Brandeis-Bardin, mainly, he says, “because I articulated the values he himself held — that the Jewish role in the world is to repair it under God’s rule.” [Michael] Harris [Bardin's assistant from 1961-71], however, argues that, “Dennis was simply there at a time when Shlomo was most vulnerable. He saw the end coming and he needed to pitch somebody.” Prager’s association with the institute was only a few years old and his appointment was not to everyone’s liking. Indeed, says Goodhill, “There were people on the board of directors who were violently opposed.”
The sources of this opposition are numerous and complex. Goodhill maintains that Prager was too young to successfully move into the slot vacated by a man considerably his senior. As Prager himself observed, “Some of the people on the board had children who were older than me.”
But it was not simply Prager’s youth inspired controversy. Nor was it Prager’s personal style, alternately charming and abrasive, inspired and, some say, demagogic. Rather, implies [William] Chotiner [Brandeis-Bardin's first president], perhaps Prager’s most vociferous critic, the issue was nothing less than a fight for the soul and future of Brandeis-Bardin.
Chotiner’s case against Prager was based upon his conviction that the type of Judaism Prager advocated was too rigid. If allowed to impose his values upon Brandeis-Bardin, Prager would ultimately betray Shlomo Bardin’s vision of the institute as a place for all Jews to enjoy. In a sense, Prager concurs with this assessment, though he insists that Chotiner was motivated by great personal animosity toward him.”
Dennis Prager served as institute director for seven years, despite the existence of a virtual split within the executive board as to his efficacy. During this time, claim both Prager and his adherents, he quadrupled the BBI membership. “I had the largest BBIs in history,” argues Prager, “which raised more money in membership fees than ever before. I was a superb administrator, and under my own administrator, Bob Bleiweiss, the place ran like clockwork.”
Even Prager’s opponents credit him with some accomplishments, specifically the singles program which he initiated. But he had no staying power, they say. “Under Dennis’s directorship,” says Chotiner, “Brandeis was a swinging door. We were picking 200 members one year and losing 150 the next.” Chotiner is not alone in his contention that Prager lacked intellectual depth. His critics argue that he was basically a “three-speech man,” and the membership grew tired of hearing the same speeches time after time. Others grew weary of what they claim were repeated bouts of vindictive, almost paranoid behavior by Prager. But there are also those among Prager’s detractors who did not share this view. Says Dr. Goodhill, “Dennis was a brilliant man. He was also very courageous — there was never anything bashful about him. I think that’s what bothered the older people on the board was the strong and rather major dominance at the institute that Dennis wanted and did exercise. We accepted that in Shlomo because it took that kind of personality to get things going. And Dennis did have to be a one-man show!”
Unfortunately for the institute, strife and dissension within the board over Prager’s leadership resulted in a brief but traumatic conflict, between 1979 and 1981, over the actual decision-making process at Brandeis-Bardin, which some called “elitist” and “undemocratic.”

Perhaps somewhat uncomfortable with his lack of academic credentials, Prager notes that he co-wrote (with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin) Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism as a kind of substitute Master's thesis. With a touch of the salesman, Prager calls the book, which has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Persian and Japanese, the "most widely used introduction to Judaism in the world."

...Over the next few years, he lectured "hundreds of times" to American audiences about Soviet Jewry. But that wasn't the only subject on which he claimed some expertise. Accepting minimal fees in return for exposure, he leapt onto the Jewish lecture circuit with talks on why Jewish youth was alienated from Jewish life. "It was part chutzpah," he admits, and part inspired experimentation.

...The seven years of Prager’s tenure in Simi Valley, however, were filled with conflict between himself and the Brandeis board, whom he accuses of treating him “miserably.” At Brandeis, Prager says now, not without bitterness, “I learned that many Jews are uncomfortable with paying another Jew to do something Jewish.”
Or was the problem, as some board members complain, that he tried to make BBI into an Orthodox institution? Prager acknowledges trying to push individuals toward greater observance, in a marked change from Bardin’s non-religious orientation that was sure to threaten and antagonize many. But he castigates the view, which he ascribes to much of the non-Orthodox community, that keeping kosher and not working on Shabbat define someone as Orthodox.
Even his critics acknowledge that Prager succeeded in exciting many young people about Jewish observance and bringing them into the Jewish community. But that enterprise had its down side as well. He developed “followers,” explains one BBI insider during those years, but he turned off many people by leaving no room for “intelligent disagreement. His bullying antagonized a lot of people.”
It is a complaint about Prager's style that clings to him even today.

A friend of mine hosts a radio talk show. Although he passionately espouses often controversial political views, he makes it a point never to insult callers who dispute his positions. Rather, he listens carefully to what they say, and always responds courteously. He told me that he reads every letter from his listeners, particularly those written by people who clearly abhor his views.
If my friend sounds unusually open to others’ criticism, that is an acquired trait. In his early days as a public speaker, he often fended off his critics with sarcasm, biting wit, and occasional anger.

Ronald Reagan

“The [1980] election of Ronald Reagan affected my happiness,” said Prager March 2, 2006. “There was a chance to turn this thing around.”
On his show June 10, 2010 at the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library, Dennis said: “He was the first one to make me aware that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. That’s my motto but that’s his sentiment. He made me aware that this is not merely an economic difference between left and right but a philosophical and moral difference. It makes worse people, big government.”
On April 20, 2011, Dennis said: “I plead guilty [to wanting to avoid politics]. My own instinct in life was to be preoccupied with what gave me and many others meaning. My profession in life was religion… I read the papers. I was always deeply concerned but it took until the Reagan administration to realize, and I was always committed to international affairs, to realize that if I didn’t fight, I was going to lose this country.”

In 2011, DennisPrager.com sold the following lecture: "What I Learned From Ronald Reagan: Reagan inspired Dennis to become a conservative. How did he do it? And what are the principles that Reagan espoused that remain so compelling today? Dennis pays homage to his mentor and looks at conservatism and liberalism -- then and now."

In a speech May 1, 2012 at the Reagan Foundation, Dennis said: "His famous sentence, 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem', proved to me that one line can change a life. A great idea can be encapsulated in one line."

In 1981, Dennis and Joseph Telushkin met the Pope. (Picture)
One day at KABC, Dennis Prager ran into Jimmy Carter, who he despises. Dennis stood up, extended his hand, and said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. President.”
Dennis believed in honoring the office of president, even if he despised the man. (March 2004, 23rd lecture on Deuteronomy)
After voting for Jimmy Carter in 1976, Dennis never voted for a Democrat again. (January, 2002 lecture on a ship to Antarctica) 

First Computer

Around 1983, Dennis bought his first PC. It cost $3,500.

On October 6, 2011, Dennis Prager talked on his radio show about Steve Jobs and the personal computer: "My first computer was 1983. I remember the Macintosh. I remember debating, should I get an IBM type or the Macintosh? The Rainbow computer from DEC was the best.

"IBM and DOSS won but they were not the best. Texas Instruments had a better system. I bought the first color portable computer. You win on marketing genius. The reason I did not get an Apple was that everyone said that if you want to work, get an IBM. The Apple is more for fun."

"I needed two things -- database and most important, word processing. The choices for Apple in word processing were small.

"I remember buying a book - a guide to word processing programs. It assessed about 20 different programs. I read the entire book. I was mesmerized. I bought a thing nobody heard of called Word Perfect for $500. Everybody used WordStar.

"I was ecstatic. The reason I have written as much as I have is called computer. Before word processing, I would write two articles a year. Then I wrote an article a week. I don't touch type. I'd have to erase everything. Remember erasable paper?"

Religion On The Line

In 1982, KABC general manager George Green, a secular Jew, told educator Roberta Weintraub that he needed someone to host the two-hour public affairs Sunday night show Religion on the Line. She suggested Prager.
“I had my first tryout on radio at KABC Radio on a Sunday night in August, ’82,” said Dennis, “and I was so nervous, I was dripping [sweat]. And then, at 11 p.m., the program director [Wally Sherwin] slips me a note, ‘Tell them you’ll be on next Sunday night’ — one of the happiest moments of my life, because I ached to get my ideas out. I’m like a cow who has milk to give and I’ve been dying to give it my whole life. So I was engaged in interfaith dialogue every Sunday night with a priest, minister, rabbi for 10 years, and it is one of the things that changed my life.” (CSPAN Booknotes)
“I had a feeling that if I did well [on his radio debut],” says Prager on his radio show January 3, 2006, “that it would change my life.”
The show had a 35 share when Dennis inherited it and he took it to a 40 share (according to Prager’s 2008 lecture on 25 years in broadcasting).

April 3, 2008, Dennis said: "When I was asked to advertise Farmer John's pork sausages, I went to an Orthodox rabbi and asked him if I am allowed to advertise pork sausage. He said, 'Let me get back to you.' He got back to me and said, 'Yes, but you may not say, 'Umm, umm good.'"

On his show January 4, 2012, Dennis said: "Like most people in radio, you are brought into it, rather than seek it. I was certainly thrilled. This was the dream of my life -- to touch people with my values and my ideas."

In a speech to Chabad of Orange County on Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said: “I am the worst candidate for the charge of religious intolerance… I was chosen to moderate the most popular show on religion in America on radio… I was chosen in part because I was so fair to the religions. Very often I would get a letter like this: ‘Dear Mr. Prager, I am an evangelical Christian and I was stunned to learn that you were Jewish.’ ‘Dear Mr. Prager, I am a Roman Catholic and I was stunned to learn that you were Jewish.’
“Everybody thought I was their religion. Jews were also stunned. A religious Jew on the radio, it doesn’t make sense. He sounds coherent. A lot of secular Jews reacted that way.”
“My favorite moment on Religion on the Line was when a caller called in. I don’t know if he was anti-Semitic. I allow people their little prejudices. I did a whole show on Oriental drivers. Asians called in and asked why do we drive so fast.
“One night a guy calls in and he starts giving the rabbi a really hard time. ‘Rabbi, isn’t it elitist and even racist for you Jews to think you are the Chosen People.’ This was a rabbi who was not terribly comfortable with the idea. He was on the more liberal end of the theological spectrum. He was queasy about the whole thing.
“Father Michael Nocita comes on and says, ‘God chose the Jews. Get a life.’ The guy said OK.”
“I opened radio to Muslims. They were never part of the Religion on the Line. I deliberately sought them because it’s a major religion. I had Muslims on so often on Religion on the Line that they invited me to various mosques to speak. I was beloved in the Muslims community during the period of Religion on the Line because I had such respect. Nobody opened up a major media outlet like I opened up ABC Radio and I was rewarded with their affection and respect.”
“The first public demonstration I organized was on behalf of Muslims in Afghanistan.”
“One day the head of the station, George Green, called me into his office. I had a little lump in my throat. He didn’t call me in much… He said, ‘Dennis, I have a question. There’s something that doesn’t make sense. There was a woman who preceded you as the moderator of Religion on the Line. [Carole Hemingway]. This woman never once acknowledged she was a Jew. And I kept getting anti-Jewish, even anti-Semitic letters against her. You, every show you mention that you are a religious Jew and I’ve never once in five years gotten an anti-Semitic letter against you.
“I felt like Joseph being called before Pharaoh. I said, ‘George, I think I know the answer. Non-Jews trust Jewish Jews more than they trust non-Jewish Jews'.”

April 3, 2008, Dennis said: "My predecessor had an agenda -- to make religion look stupid. She would ask priests if the Pope [masturbated]. I would never ask that. It's disgusting."

May 3, 2010, Dennis said: “I got quite close to a number of Muslims [in the 1980s]. It was their failure to organize demonstrations against Islamic terror [after August 2000, the Second Intifada] which caused a certain breach, which I felt sad about. I couldn’t understand their relative silence about this terror.”

In a speech at the Nixon Library Mary 14, 2012 about his fifth book Still The Best Hope, Dennis said: "You know from my radio show, I do not say, I do not think, I do not argue, that people have bad motives who have different views than I. You have no idea how liberating that is. The only reason that I've been able to write this book is that in my first years in radio, I realized I have to assume that those I differ with mean well. The reason it is liberating is that it made me fight their ideas intellectually rather than ad hominen. If everybody you differ with is an idiot, is selfish, is despicable, is greedy, then why debate? That's what they think of us. That's why we always win the debates. I've had the biggest left-wing names in the world on my show."

"Why would you debate somebody who is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, racist and bigoted? Why would you do that? You don't debate a Klu Klux Klansman. That's how they feel about us. We're not worthy of debate. We're all these bad things."

In 1985, Prager debated Rabbi Meir Kahane on the Ray Breem show. “It was one of the ugliest debates of my life,” says Dennis in a 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 15. “He was insulting the whole night.”

In a 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 16, Dennis said that for ten years on his radio show Religion on the Line, he asked Christians, “What does three in one mean?”
There is no answer because the Christian doctrine of the trinity is a logical impossibility.
Christians believe they believe in one God so who am I to say differently, said Dennis.
“I would ask the Christian clergy what does it mean. I almost started a fist fight between two Christians on this one. One Christian clergyman said, Dennis, here’s a rough idea. You are a father, a husband and a brother. Are there three of you? No.
“The other Christian said, that’s heretical. That’s a heresy. That heresy was wiped out in the fourth century. That is utterly unacceptable. Dennis, don’t listen to him.
“And I just sat there and knew the ratings were going up as they yelled at each other. I was a happy dude.”
In a 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said: “One night, the topic I chose for the evening was lust. What does your religion say about lust? The minister quoted Jesus that a man who lusts after another woman it is as if he has committed adultery in his heart. How wrong it is to lust. How it is a sin. The Catholic priest said essentially the same thing. They both spoke beautifully.”
“That week, was not only an Orthodox rabbi, but a bearded right-wing Orthodox rabbi. He had a yiddish accent. He said, “Dennis, lust, shmust.’
“It was my proudest moment as a Jew in my life. I still have a slight scar from biting my lip.”

The Los Angeles Times published Feb. 19, 1989:

[Walter] Martin ran into a brief but intense firestorm several years ago when he appeared on Dennis Prager 's "Religion on the Line" show on KABC radio in Los Angeles. Martin cited Scripture and other sources in assigning blame for Jesus' crucifixion to some Jewish authorities of the time, rather than the Romans. He insists that he did not suggest that the Jews as a people, then or since then, were responsible for the execution. "I wasn't holding Jews today accountable for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ," Martin says.

But Prager says this distinction is an odd and "subtle one, given that an innumerable number of Jews have been killed and tortured on the basis of that charge. Mr. Martin came very close to raising the specter of medieval Christian charges of deicide against the Jews."

According to a tape of the broadcast which Martin himself provided to The Times, he said that "any Jew or Gentile alive today that hears the gospel of Jesus Christ and turns away from God's love in the cross is participating in that crucifixion."

When pressed by Prager, Martin defended the passage in John 8:44, which characterizes the Jews who rejected the divinity of Jesus at the time of the crucifixion as children of the devil. Some liberal Christian scholars have pointed out the passage as an example of New Testament anti-Semitism. In the 6 1/2 years that he has been doing his own program, Prager says, "no Christian-whether fundamentalist Protestant or liberal Protestant, conservative or liberal Catholic-ever said anything approaching Mr. Martin's concept of the crucifixion."

Despite the controversy, though, on Prager's subsequent shows and in the local Jewish press, Prager has said the problem with Martin is more one of being a "misanthrope" than an anti-Semite.

"He doesn't have a good word for anyone who isn't identified with his theology," Prager says.

After your 400th show, you're entitled to some generalizations. One is - the Jew is usually the most talkative and the Protestant is usually the most quiet. There must be a reason.

The Jew is usually the most passionately involved in something, volatile, gets angry, verbalizes, lets out, etc.. The Protestant is usually the nicest. In eight years I heard one offensive word from a Protestant [Walter Martin]and he was a bona fide nut. These Protestants are the sweetest, nicest, most self-controlled people you will ever meet.

Catholics run in all directions. Some are controlled and some are volatile.

The religions produced these differences. Protestantism emphasizes the heart. Catholics are in the middle. Judaism emphasizes works. Therefore, the Jew has been the freest to make peace with his miserable thoughts. Protestants are the least free because they are sinful.

That's why when it came out that Jimmy Carter lusted for women other than his wife, Jews yawned and Protestants were horrified. A born again Christian and he lusts? Oh my God.

I see this up close. If you were to go into a church and see the worship and the rituals and the beliefs, from a Jewish perspective, this is idolatry.

If Christians get let off the hook for being idolaters and they believe that God assumes human form in the incarnation, then if you assume God manifests in a statute, how is that different?

Once you assume that Christianity is not idolatry for non-Jews, then I don’t know what is idolatry for non-Jews. I don’t know what else qualifies.

Finally…our thanks to Janice Prager who, despite her time-consuming work on a book on Jewish moral values for children, was the single greatest source of suggestions, criticisms, and morale boosting...
...though numbering less than 3 percent of the American population, [Jews] have won 27% of the Nobel prizes awarded American scientists, that Jews are overrepresented in medicine by 231 percent in proportion to the general population, in psychiatry by 478 percent, in dentistry by 299 percent, in law by 265 percent, and in mathematics by 238 percent, that American Jews are twice as likely as non-Jews to go to college, and that they are represented in Ivy League schools over five times their percentage in the population. This Jewish passion for study in turn helps to explain why Jews have the highest income of any ethnic group in the United States, earning 72% more than the national average, and 40% more than the Japanese, the second highest earning ethnic group.
This unique intellectual achievement is not due, as is sometimes alleged, to some innately superior intellgience among Jews, but solely and directly to Judaism.

In the summer of 1980, Dennis met Janice Adelstein, a nurse at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Hilda and I were then visiting BBI and we both liked her immediately when our son informed us that he was interested in her as a prospective spouse. She was tall, pretty, charismatic and wise; a perfect candidate to be our daughter-in-law. We met her parents, Malvina and Jack and found them to be ideal machitonim (in-laws). Ten months later, on January 15, 1981, they were wed in the House of the Book at BBI which was situated on a hill with the most amazing scenery. Since Dennis was the Director, he invited all the members of the Institute to the wedding which was held around 1 PM.
The total number of guests including family, friends and members totaled a figure in excess of 500. After the ceremony, a reception was held with plenty of food and dancing. The two families then retired to their respective homes to redress and prepare for another reception at the Sephardic Temple on Wilshire Blvd. To this event, we invited 200 guests and had a wonderful evening with catered food, music and dancing.

On January 31, 1983, we were blessed with another grandchild, David, born to Dennis and Janice. Of course, we were delighted to travel to LA to participate in this great simcha (happy occasion) and bris (circumcision). I was honored to be the sandik (the person holding the child in his lap during the circumcision). I was extremely happy to have my brother Murry and Gert present at this enjoyable event in our lives.

I grew up Orthodox where it was taken for granted that every Jew who died in the Middle Ages because he wouldn’t convert to Christianity was a martyr sanctifying G-d’s name. And they were. I accept that totally.
When I had my first child, I saw them differently. As a single young man, martyrdom was clearly the option to take. If somebody said to me today, accept X or we will kill your family, I don’t know what I’d do.

Said Dennis in a 1992 lecture on Genesis 16-17: “When my son [David] was circumcised, I cried more than I ever recall crying from the deepest sense of meaning and joy. To know that I was doing what Jews have done for over 3,000 years… I was privy to circumcisions done in Russia in secret. My son’s circumcision was the most bonding thing I’ve done to the Jewish people. Nothing was as primal, as gut-wrenching emotion as that moment. I passionate believe in it.”
Said Dennis in a 1993 lecture on Genesis 29, “The amount of psychological garbage people bring to marriage. The choice is frequently not made even consciously, but subconsciously, things worked out from one’s upbringing, I am almost tempted to pass a law that you can not have a child in your first marriage for five years. Ideally, people will all start with their second marriage because so much nonsense is worked out with the first one.”
Janice co-authored the children’s book, Why Be Different: A Look Into Judaism.

According to her author bio: "Janice Prager -- nurse, writer, human rights activist, wife and mother -- had a chance to combine all her skills in Pakistan, where she worked among wounded and homeless refugees of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan."

In the Winter 1986 issue of Ultimate Issues, Janice wrote about her efforts on behalf of Afghans. "Though I am a Jew who has spent her life learning the lessons of the Holocaust, I came to realize that empathy with others' suffering is not automatic, even for Jews."

In August 1986, Dennis and Janice divorced after five years of marriage.

There's a whole cottage industry of people attacking Dennis Prager personally. Those who hate him look for his weaknesses and believe they've found them in his divorces. 

“Of course I am committed to it [sexual fidelity],” said Prager on his radio show Dec. 9, 2009. “How could I do this show if I weren’t?”

On his show May 23, 2012, Dennis said: "If I hear that a spouse had an affair, unless I know that this is a person who is simply a serial adulterer, I don't make any judgment. I don't know. From the few people I know personally who've had affairs, I do not know one who wanted to have it."

On his radio show Oct. 11, 2010, Dennis told a caller named Sam: “I don’t judge people by their thoughts. I judge people by their actions. If a person has the most racist thoughts on earth, but acts beautifully towards people of every race that person is not a racist. In your view, that person is a racist.”
Sam: “That person is inhuman because it is impossible…”
Dennis: “No. You’re wrong. That is not true. Then it is inhuman for every man to stay faithful because every man wants to have an extra-marital affair.”
Sam: “Do you want to have extra-marital affairs? I don’t.”
Dennis: “Yes. You don’t? Then you are lying to me and you are lying to yourself. You are the only man I’ve met who has actually said that with a straight face.
“You have no desire for any woman then your wife?”
Sam: “I do not.”
Dennis: “OK. You are amazing. Then you are a phenomenon.”
“Sam represented something that I have noted since graduate school — a profound amount of fooling oneself because of unpleasant reality.”
“Sam’s call will be the subject of a male-female hour. I’m going to play it. Men who lie about their own nature to themselves and why would they do that. One huge thing that gay and heterosexual men have in common is a desire for variety and immediate stimulation through the visual. For a man to deny that he has any desire for another woman sexually is to lie to himself in a way that frightens me.”
“Obviously it is a statement about my wife that I can be so open about this on the radio and have zero thought about how would she react.”
“I knew as a bachelor in my twenties that I couldn’t live with someone from whom I had to hide my nature. And that’s what he has to do apparently. It shook me up. Truth is the most important value.”
Said Dennis Oct. 12, 2011: “That’s like saying you have no desire for any other kind of food. I like steak, I have no desire for pasta, pizza, lamb chops…”

In a (2008?) lecture on Deut. 23:19, Dennis said about his first divorce: “It’s a dramatic moment, even if all the civil stuff has been worked out.
“Divorce is a Mitzva is a great book. [Rabbi Perry Netter] says that the beauty of Jewish ritual is that God is with you when you marry and He’s with you when you divorce.
“We were at the Bet Din of Los Angeles. I arrived before my soon-to-be ex-wife. He starts talking to me. The man is an older man with a long grey beard from Poland. Classic Orthodox Jew rabbi [Shmuel Katz].
“I come in and he says, ‘Dennis Prager! I love your show!’
“I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone. I could not believe the guy knew me from Adam let alone listen to the radio. He looked like a guy who didn’t even own a radio.
“We make small talk. I said, ‘Rabbi, it must be difficult for you a traditional Orthodox rabbi to be the head of the Beit Din in Southern California. That must be really tough for you with all of these divorces.’
“Then the man blew my mind. He said, ‘Mr. Prager, that’s not the case at all. There were a lot of marriage in the old country that should have ended in divorce and didn’t.’
“To come out of this face behind a big grey beard, I was astonished, but that man spoke from the depths of Orthodoxy in a very Jewish manner. He knew many miserable couples in the old country because there was so much stigma.”
“As life would have it, he was the rabbi on this particular Religion on the Line [in 1988]… I pick the topic, what is your religion’s attitude to divorce? All three clergy, including him, said the same thing. People divorce too easily.”
“In round two, I asked, do you know anybody very well who divorced? The rabbi said his parents divorced. It was important that they do so.”
None of the clergy (including Father Gregory Coiro, whose parents divorced) knew anybody well who had divorced easily.
“I don’t know anybody who divorced for trivia. Did Prince [Charles] divorce because he found a prettier woman? Or because the idiot royalty rules said he had to marry a virgin? Instead of marrying a partner in life who happened not to be a virgin. So everybody’s life got screwed up. And the royalty looked ridiculous. Nobody would now argue that the woman he is now married to [Camilla] is prettier than Diana. But that was his partner. That’s who he should have married.”
“We tend to overstate the effects of divorce on children over the long term. If the two parents don’t belittle each other…”

The evidence does not bear out Prager's wishful assertion that divorce isn't so hard on kids. As W. Bradford Wilcox notes, "even privileged kids suffer when the family breaks down. ...[A]t every socioeconomic level, families headed by a continuously married couple will earn more money and accumulate more wealth than other types of families with similar educational and personal backgrounds."

"...[T]hey are less likely to graduate from college and less likely to maintain their privileged position on the economic ladder as adults." 

On Adam Carolla's podcast Jan. 24, 2012, Dennis Prager says: "One of my most embarrassing stories which might explain why that marriage didn't last as long as it should have.

"A previous wife [Janice?] came home one day. She looked in pain. She had severe cuts and bruises on her arm. I asked, what happened?

"She said, I was walking in a parking lot and there was a window open and I was bit by a dog. And I said, 'Bitten.'"

"I can't stand bad grammar. We all have our thing." 

The Monotony Of Monogamy

As a 2007 article noted, "Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that's much better than not marrying anyone at all.
"Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don't realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy." 

Aug. 19, 2010, Dennis said:

“I had just entered my teens when Dr. No came out. And I vowed to attend every one in part because of the women. Whoever had the job of selecting the women for James Bond films, if you believe in karma, this person had to be a saint in a previous life.”
“One element of James Bond’s success is that you always know that good will triumph over the evil.
“Second. Good guys are not usually having fun and he does. The good guy is rewarded in this world — look at those women, outfits, cars.”
Author Sinclair McKay: “You wonder how sustainable a life that is? You’d worry if a friend of yours lived a life like that.”
Dennis: “Why not fantasize that?”
Sinclair: “The nature of the fantasy has changed over the years to the more austere Daniel Craig version we see today. He’s almost monogamous.”
Dennis groans. “I have to be monogamous. I don’t want James Bond to have to be.”

...respectable publications have started to discuss a major reason why the AIDS rate is so high in black Africa: the tendency of women to have "multiple concurrent relationships."

...I speculate that, at least in the western half of Eurasia, Europe and Africa, there is a "cline" running from, say, Finland in the north to sub-Saharan Africa in the south, of decreasing personal tendency toward monogamousness.

...The mechanism, I would guess, is shyness. Finns are painfully shy, so chasing women is hard work. Once you've got one, you do what it takes to keep her happy so you don't have to go through the agony of meeting another woman.

The farther south you go, the more forward men become. 

...South of the Sahara, men tend to be extremely outgoing, and talented in the arts of seduction (chatting up girls, dancing, singing, and so forth).

...This is one of the reasons it's likely that Islamic fundamentalism will become even more popular in the slums of Europe. Its strictures can serve to prevent moral collapse in a welfare state. When American states followed the Scandinavian lead and boosted AFDC payments to single mothers in the early 1960s, the moral collapse of poor blacks was almost instantaneous. Crime, illegitimacy, and drug use shot upwards as many black men reverted to their forefathers' family structures and started to live off their women.

Very roughly speaking, the farther north a people originated, the slower the welfare state works its moral rot.

I read with great interest the article, “Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization.” I was very impressed by the Jewish aspect of your work and also the way you dealt with the psychological problem. You managed to convey clearly where the issue stands at present. Of course, there will be psychiatrists who will disagree with you, but this usually doesn’t seem to bother you.

She does seem awfully eager to find homoeroticism — poor Rockwell cannot go on a fishing trip with other men without his biographer finding sexual overtones. In “The Runaway,” a painting of a burly cop and a little boy on adjacent cafe stools, the cop leans toward the boy “as if to emphasize the . . . tenderness that can form between a grown man and a little boy . . . the hint of homoeroticism” — oh, come on. In “Girl at Mirror,” a young girl in a white slip studies her own reflection — “Actually,” says Solomon, “seen from the back, she could be a boy.” And the girl’s doll, tossed on the floor? “A bizarrely sexualized object.” ­Really? “With her right hand buried in her petticoats, the doll could almost be masturbating.” Well, I suppose that Michelangelo’s “David” could “almost” be masturbating. So have we all sometimes almost.

A KABC Radio commentator recently spoke at Caltech about an unusual assignment that he was appointed to by President Reagan. He was sent to Vienna as an American delegate for the Helsinki review conference, and he spoke about this in the talk sponsored by the Caltech Y's Distinguished Speakers Fund and Hillel Extension.
Dennis Prager was one of 12 "public members," that is, nondiplomats, representing the United States at the Helsinki review conference in Vienna. Mr. Prager was a delegate during the opening weeks of the conference.
The conference, still going on, has been reviewing the human rights situation in the Europe. The 35 participating countries are all European with the exception of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. The basis for their human rights judgments are contained in the Helsinki Accords of 1975 which guaranteed such basic human rights as freedom of religion and movement. The Accords also provided for official recognition of post-World War II borders, technological cooperation, and the monitoring of human rights.
Mr. Prager first spoke about the advantages and disadvantages of the Accords. Many people have been highly critical ofthe Accords because they feel that it has been ineffective in bringing about permanent human rights changes in the Soviet Union, that it gave the Soviets exactly what they wanted in terms of border recognition, that it has helped only the Eastern Bloc countries, and not the West, in technological development.
However, Mr. Prager gave reasons for why he thinks the Helsinki Accords is indeed better for human rights in the long run.
"Number one, you might recall that whenever the West attacked the Soviet Union for human rights violations, the Soviet response was, 'Those are internal affairs, and you may not meddle in our internal affairs.' Helsinki as rendered that unacceptable in international dialogue. For that alone I think Helsinki was worth it.
"Number two, it has made human rights an international issue. By their signing the Accords human rights has become, de facto, acceptable as an international concern . . .previously Western Europe had had a nonconfrontational attitude toward the Soviet Union in human rights. But the human rights issue has now been resurrected as an issue in Western Europe with regard to the Soviet Union thanks to the Helsinki Accords.
"In the final analysis, I ask the dissidents themselves. Those dissidents like Bukovsky who are against the Accords are in the minority among dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who feel the Helsinki Accords have been ineffective."
Mr. Prager explained that Helsinki monitors are people who appoint themselves-certainly they are not appointed by government s - to monitor the compliance of their country's government to the Helsinki Accords.
He noted, "The Soviets still crack down on Helsinki monitors. If it wasn't important the Soviets would not have arrested 37 out of 38 of the monitors. One question is whether the Helsinki monitoring movement dead in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That's a serious question especially if you expel all those who monitor them, which has happened with Orlov and Sharansky, for example.
"But there's no question the Helsinki Accords have revived the debate, on Soviet and Communist human r ight s violations, in Western Europe and partially in the United States and certainly in the Soviet Union and East Europe.
"Now there is something someone in the Soviet Union can hang his hat on- they can say, 'You published in Pravda and Isvestia that you would follow the Helsinki human rights agreements.' The publishing ofthe Accords was part of the agreement, and on that day, that one day, there was a ray of hope for human rights in those [Eastern bloc] countries."
Mr. Prager shared with the audience what he termed "the single most boring activity" he had undertaken in his adult life. The undertaking of this activity motivated him to remark, "Whatever part of me ever wanted to become a diplomat was destroyed. There are a thousand professions I could name off hand that I would prefer to being a diplomat."
The activity he was talking about was his compilation of report cards for all 35 foreign ministers who spoke. He rated each from "excellent" to "worthless." He gave "excellent" to those countries which sited specific violations in strong terms. The United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, W. Germany, and Great Britain were excellent for mentioning specifics, including the situation of dissidents, Soviet J ewry, the psychiatric hospitals in which Soviet dissidents have been put in, the Soviet Union's activity in Afghanistan, etc.
On Iceland's statement Mr. Prager said, "I get the chills when I recall this, since it is the greatest ongoing human rights violation going on at the moment. It's what has been described by even the Washington Post as 'genocide.' Iceland mentioned Afghanistan in a very touching context. The foreign minister mentioned that Iceland and Afghanistan were admitted to the U.N. on the same day, and he said, 'Look at the fates that have befallen our respective countries since then.'"
...Mr. Prager was disappointed but "sobered" by the human rights statement by the Vatican.
 "The Holy See, the Catholic church, said nothing on behalf of Christians in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Being involved in this I can tell you that there are considerably more Christians in Soviet prison camps for being Christian than there are Jews for being Jewish, something by the way which is virtually unknown to Christians, Jews, or anybody else living in the West. In fact, so persecuted are the Christians that merely to be a a member of certain Christian sects in the Soviet Union is to be involved in an illegal act. To be a Jew is not illegal. To practice Judaism may be illegal, but to merely be a Ukrainian Catholic of whom there are 4 million is simply not allowed.
"And yet by and large, the Christian world is silent with regard to the persecution offellow Christians. And hearing the Holy See say nothing about persecution of Catholics helped me understand something that I've long suspected when Jews have asked about the Holy See's relative silence during the Holocaust. It was usually perceived as antisemitism. I tend not to think that it was. I tend to think that the Holy See is quiet when anybody is persecuted, and in this regard this statement is both a defense and an accusation. It's a defense of specific antisemitism in the Holocaust but it is also an indictment on its lack of moral vigor when anybody is being persecuted..."
Mr. Prager told a few vignettes, one about the ambassador from Liechtenstein (a country of 65 square miles next to Switzerland). "Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, the head of the U.S. delegation, gave a speech on November 14 which was entirely devoted to giving the names and stories of Soviet victims of oppression. He gave case after case with their addresses, and i f they existed, their phone numbers. So I was sitting there wondering how the Soviets would respond. But before that happened an amazing thing occurred.
"The Liechtenstinian ambassador asked the chairman for permission for everybody to stand for a minute of silence honoring all these victims listed by Ambassador Zimmerman! And I loved that moment, it was precious. It was a moment when reality and utter nondiplomacy to the point of Dostoevsky's Idiot's naivete, had actually entered the room. The man had reacted totally undiplomatically- even the Americans were stunned. The Soviets stand up for victims of their own government? It was a real likelihood. So there was mumbling, a silence except for me who was crunching at my teeth. I couldn't help smiling. No one else was smiling because diplomats learn not to smile or grimace.
"There's a hubbub at the chair. They mumbled something back about having to check the rules on this very unorthodox request, that they simply don't know the rules, and that they'll get back to him later, hoping the 'don't-call, we'll-call-you' approach would work. But the Liechtenstinian doesn't back down and insists on a ruling...
According to Mr. Prager, the East view of human rights is different from that of the West. "For years, I have been hearing, which they still say, that they have a very different concept of rights in the Communist world. That's true. But they will add, 'We believe that it is a basic human right to work. I t took me five years to figure out the response to that, because it is very hard to answer what I believe is demagoguery. But I realize what the answer is. 'Yes, in the Soviet Union you have the right to work. But in the West you have a right you don't have in the Soviet Union, the right not to work.' It was something which we then implemented in the list of standard U.S. answers to Soviet nonsense.
"In the Soviet Union, if you don't work you go to prison camp. In the United States if you don't work you get a check. It's a very big difference! This isn't a defense of unemployment, it is merely a statement of the difference. "There's an addition to this - the definition of a slave. The one right a slave has is the right to work! The second way that the Soviets respond to criticism, according to Mr. Prager, is to repeat, "You can talk about human rights all you like. The Soviet Union cares about the greatest human right of all, the right to survive, the right of the earth to survive, and therefore we must have arms control."
That has a staggering amount of acceptance in the West. All other issues are subsidiary to the issue of the survival of the human race. By arguing that, they sound like they really care and we're callous. That's the power of constantly raising in response to the human rights issue the nuclear weapons issue."

In 1989, Dennis married Fran, a divorcee with a daughter Anya. Fran was born in Kansas whose parents were Lutheran. She was divorced from a Jew and, although it was possible that she converted to Judaism at the time of her first marriage, Dennis would not marry her unless she went through a year of study with an Orthodox rabbi. She consented and after a year she and Anya were converted according to Orthodox halacha (law).
The marriage ceremony was performed in the Young Israel of Century City by Rabbi Muskin, an Orthodox rabbi in Los Angeles. It was attended by many members of our family and Fran’s mother, brother and members of her family; her father had died many years ago. What amazed me was the joy and elation exhibited by her family at this very Orthodox wedding.

…I have never seen so many different kinds of Jews gathered together in one enclosed place. All acting very Jewish. …Some of the black hats are also trying to change seats because they have been seated next to a female. The smokers put in the nonsmoking section are trying to make deals with the smokers in the smoking section.

Few Muslim leaders have actually condemned Khomeini, and I know of none who have declared a would-be killer of Salman Rushdie a murderer.

...[E]ither there are relatively few Muslim believers, or they are numerous but very afraid of antagonizing their more vicious co-religionists. Neither scenario is comforting to the rest of us.

"What do we have in life, after all, that is more valuable than our name and reputation? What do good people work hardest at maintaining, if not their good name?" 

Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization

In the fall of 1989, Dennis Prager began speaking in depth on his radio show about homosexuality and he devoted the entire April-June 1990 edition (about 10,000 words) of Ultimate Issues to “Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization.”

Generally speaking, I do not concern myself with the actions of consenting adults in the privacy of their homes, and I certainly oppose government involvement with what consenting adults do in private...
To a world which divided human sexuality between penetrator and penetrated, Judaism said, “You are wrong — sexuality is to be divided between male and female.” To a world which saw women as baby producers unworthy of romantic and sexual attention, Judaism said, “You are wrong — women must be the sole focus of men’s erotic love.” To a world which said that sensual feelings and physical beauty were life’s supreme values, Judaism said, “You are wrong — ethics and holines are the supreme values.”

We lost one out of every three Jews during the Holocaust. Today we continue to lose about the same percentage to assimilation. Obviously, we are in terrible need of more Jews. With more Jews every Jewish problem comes closer to solution.
More Jews means far more Jewish resources — more Jewish schools, more Jewish institutions of all types, more resources to resettle Jews, to help poor Jews, to fight anti-Semitism and to build Israel. Conversely, the fewer Jews there are, the more impotent and irrelevant to the world Jews become. With small numbers, Jews will become little more than a religious sect — much better known, but not much more influential — than the Amish. While large numbers do not ensure great influence, nations surely do not increase their influence while their already small numbers dwindle.

The parallels between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler are as true as they are often made...

Saddam's invasion of Kuwait is the test of the post Cold War era just as Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler's of Czechoslovakia were the tests of the pre-World War II era...

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, like the invasions of the 1930s, will determine our future.

I think that most people writing about international politics don't have much useable history. They keep making the same two analogies (everything is either Munich or Vietnam)...

I also think that they have zero quantitative knowledge. Comparisons of Saddam's Iraq and Hitler's Germany used to bug me, since Germany had the second largest economy in the world and was a real contender, while Iraq had the fortieth largest GNP and didn't have a pot to piss in.

...In the same way, people who equate the dangers of jihadism with that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union really don't know big from small, don't know anything about the roots of national power.

Liberia	18.4	18.3	18.4	2010 est.
Tanzania	18.3	18.0	18.5	2010 est.
Madagascar	18.1	17.8	18.3	2010 est.
Angola	18.0	18.0	18.0	2010 est.
Gambia, The	18.0	17.9	18.2	2010 est.
Afghanistan	18.0	17.9	18.1	2010 est.
Zimbabwe	17.8	16.7	18.9	2010 est.
Somalia	17.6	17.4	17.7	2010 est.
Gaza Strip	17.5	17.4	17.7	2010 est.
Mozambique	17.5	17.1	17.9	2010 est.
Sao Tome and Principe	17.5	17.0	17.9	2010 est.
Benin	17.3	16.9	17.8	2010 est.
Mayotte	17.3	18.1	16.5	2010 est.
Zambia	17.2	17.1	17.3	2010 est.
Malawi	17.1	17.0	17.3	2010 est.
Ethiopia	16.8	16.5	17.2	2010 est.
Burkina Faso	16.8	16.6	17.0	2010 est.
Congo, Republic of the	16.9	16.7	17.2	2010 est.
Burundi	16.8	16.6	17.0	2010 est.
Chad	16.6	15.5	17.8	2010 est.
Congo, Democratic Republic of the	16.5	16.3	16.7	2010 est.
Yemen	16.4	16.8	16.0	2010 est.
Mali	16.2	15.8	16.6	2010 est.
Niger	15.2	15.0	15.4	2010 est.
Uganda	15.0	14.9	15.1	2010 est.

Monaco	48.9	48.0	49.9	2010 est.
Japan	44.6	42.9	46.5	2010 est.
Italy	44.3	43.0	45.6	2010 est.
Germany	43.7	42.3	45.3	2010 est.
Jersey	43.4	42.5	44.2	2010 est.
Hong Kong	42.8	42.4	43.2	2010 est.
Guernsey	42.7	41.8	43.5	2010 est.
Austria	42.6	41.5	43.6	2010 est.
Finland	41.6	40.2	43.0	2011 est.
Greece	42.2	41.1	43.2	2010 est.
San Marino	42.1	41.3	42.8	2010 est.
Slovenia	42.1	40.4	43.7	2010 est.
Belgium	42.0	40.7	43.3	2010 est.
Sweden	41.7	40.6	42.9	2010 est.
Bermuda	41.6	40.2	43.1	2010 est.
Bulgaria	41.6	39.4	43.9	2010 est.
Spain	41.5	40.1	42.9	2010 est.
Liechtenstein	41.4	40.8	41.9	2010 est.
Hungary	41.3	39.1	43.2	2011 est.[3]
Switzerland	41.3	40.3	42.4	2010 est.
Croatia	41.2	39.3	43.0	2010 est.
Serbia	41.1	39.4	42.9	2010 est.
Netherlands	40.8	40.0	41.6	2010 est.
Denmark	40.7	39.8	41.6	2010 est.
Canada	40.7	39.6	41.8	2010 est.
United Kingdom	40.5	39.4	41.5	2010 est.

Lawrence Auster wrote Nov. 24, 2006:

Prager supports mass immigration and is a passionate crusader against “racism” (he even labels as “racist” people who prefer to marry people of the same race). Spencer for his part proposes a rather demanding questionnaire that prospective Muslim immigrants would have to answer to demonstrate that they are not believers in jihad, but beyond that he does not criticize America’s non-discriminatory immigration policies or call for the end of Muslim immigration or even its reduction. Prager and Spencer both believe that Muslims, with the exception of those nasty radical Muslims whom they want to screen out, can be assimilated into America. But then Prager and Spencer express shock and outrage that a Muslim American who has been elected to Congress intends to take his oath of office on the Koran. Well, what did they expect? Did they think that even a moderate Muslim would want to take his oath on the Jewish and Christian scriptures?

...Ellison’s election to Congress is part and parcel of the ongoing Islamization of American life that has been brought about mainly by Muslim immigration. Without that immigration, Islam would have remained a tiny insignificant element in America, and Ellis would not have been elected to Congress. Or, if he had been elected, it would have been seen as a freak occurrence, not conveying the threatening message that we are losing control over our culture and institutions. In any case, Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants will inevitably be elected to Congress and other offices in the future, and will inevitably want to take their oath on the Koran, and what will the right-liberals say then?

Prager’s and Spencer’s reaction exemplifies the incurable superficiality of right-liberalism. The right-liberals assume that all human beings are the same, and therefore that all non-Western peoples including Muslims (except for certified extremists) can be assimilated into America. The right-liberals then are surprised that these aliens believe in their own, non-Western religions. Their surprise proves that the right-liberals have never subjected their universalist belief system to the slightest critical examination. They have never asked themselves if it is really true that all people can assimilate into America. They have never said to themselves, Gosh, if we admit Muslims into America, won’t they want to make Islam a part of America? Somehow they assumed that no matter whom we admitted into America, America would remain the same—that Muslims would somehow stay in some private, insignificant sphere, doing their jobs, paying their taxes, raising their children, without actually becoming active members of our society and thus bringing their own desires, preferences, and belief systems into the public sphere where they would visibly affect and transform America.

By contrast, traditionalists recognize that Muslims are (and here comes the little fact that endlessly shocks the liberals) Muslims. That’s right, folks: Muslims are Muslims. The people with whom Muslims share a sacred bond of solidarity are their fellow Muslims (including jihadists and terrorists), not Jews and Christians. Their model of behavior is Muhammad, not Jesus. Their law is the sharia, not the Constitution. Their holy book is the Koran, not the Bible. From which it follows that if we don’t want elected officials in this country to be taking their oath of office on the Koran, we must do whatever is necessary to prevent the increase of the Muslim population. We must, at a minimum, not admit Muslim immigrants. We must, at a minimum, deport Muslim non-citizens. And to the extent that Islam is already here, as a result of immigration or conversion, we must restrict and delegitimize it, as a belief system that is totally incompatible with the laws and customs of our society and our character as a people.

Prager and Spencer seem to want the effects of such a policy—they want Ellison to be stopped from swearing on the Koran—without articulating the policy itself. That is, they don’t want to say that Islam, as a religion incompatible with our Constitution, must be deprived of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. In brief, they think they can have traditionalist, non-liberal results (namely the preservation of a recognizable and cohesive society based on a common culture), without embracing traditionalist, non-liberal principles.

Lawrence Auster wrote Dec. 5, 2006:

On one hand, like a conservative, he posits that America has a particular moral and religious culture. He says that the Judeo-Christian tradition is central to American life and must never be challenged. On the other hand, like a liberal, he insists on the totally non-discriminatory inclusion in this country of Muslims who obviously are going to challenge that culture. And when, as has inevitably happened, the Muslims do challenge it, Prager’s conservative side springs back into action and he denounces the Muslims for disrespecting the American tradition!

...He improvises his own Torah as he goes along. His position in this case, announced from on top of his personal Mount Sinai, is that all office holders in the U.S. regardless of their religious beliefs must take their oath on the Bible, because the Bible is the source of our values and our constitutional principles of liberty. Of course there is no U.S. law requiring this, but such is the Gospel according to St. Dennis, which transcends U.S. law. At the same time, St. Dennis insists on the mass immigration of people whose religion commands them to crush beneath their feet biblical religion and the people who follow it.

...Prager, quite rightly, wants America to be a particularist, “Judeo-Christian” society. Yet his liberal principles of equality and non-discrimination lead inevitably to the destruction of the religious and moral particularity that he prizes.

Obviously I agree with Prager that the Koran does not belong in American public life. But unlike Prager I am consistent on the point and say that Muslims themselves do not belong in America and that it is a fatal mistake to allow their immigration hither.

Auster wrote Dec. 6, 2006:

In a traditionalist America, Muslims would not be allowed to immigrate or be naturalized. The Koran would not be allowed any place in our public life. Also, in a traditionalist America with a restored federal Constitution, the individual states would have restored to them their right to have religious establishments if they chose, and to institute restrictions on citizenship, the franchise, and political office based on religious belief, as was true of many states up to the mid 19th century. Obviously, there would not be enough Muslims in such an America for a Muslim Congressman to be elected, but, if there were, he could not use the Koran to take his oath on, because it would be understood that the Koran has no place in the United States and in the several states...

This would not be a violation of the First Amendment, since Islam is not a religion as ordinarily understood. Islam is a tyrannical religio-political system aimed at the destruction of every non-Islamic government including our own. Therefore Islam should have no rights as a religion in this country. 

In the 19th century, a series of federal statutes and court decisions banned both the Mormon practice of polygamy and the promotion of polygamy, on the basis that polygamy is antithetical to our civilization. Any religious rights that the “religiously based” practice of polygamy might have claimed were superseded by the larger fact that polygamy is incompatible with our very civilization. I think the same reasoning ought to be applied to Islam.

Now what I’ve laid out above is an ideal situation. What do we do in our actual situation? As I said, given our present, liberal institutions, I see no legal basis to stop Ellison from doing what he wants. If we want to stop him from doing what he wants, we must change our system in a fundamental manner, namely, by limiting the application of the liberal principles of freedom and equality to those groups and cultures and religions that are compatible with, or at least not dangerous to, our society. Tolerance and equality have their place, but they cannot be our ruling principles. No society can survive for long if non-discriminatory tolerance and equality are its ultimate guide. Look at Britain as it heads into the abyss. Therefore the liberal principles of tolerance and equality must be limited by the parameters of our actual culture and of our structural, non-liberal political principles, such as, for example, national sovereignty and constitutional limits on government. Things radically antithetical to our culture, our sovereignty, and our constitutional structure should not receive tolerance and equal treatment. Meaning that we would officially and formally strip Islam of its free exercise rights. At present we are obviously not living in a traditionalist society, but if we want to stop Muslims from bringing their religion into American public life, we must begin moving in that direction.

To sum up, there are two consistent and principled ways of approaching this problem.

There is the consistent liberal path, which says that all people must be admitted equally into America, have equal religious rights in America, and can take their oath on the Koran and even institute sharia law if they want.

Then there is the consistent traditionalist path, which says we have a certain Constitution, a certain form of government, a certain form of society, a certain understanding of individual rights, certain common moral beliefs, and a certain culture. We do not include and tolerate all things equally, but only those things that are compatible with our actual culture.

Dennis Prager is caught between these two positions, and does not understand the nature of the contradiction or even the fact that he is caught in it, because he takes for granted his liberal principles AND his conservative attachments and he simply assumes he can have both. In reality he cannot have both. If he wants to preserve America as a Judeo-Christian society, then he must restrict citizenship to people who are compatible with such a society. And if he wants to have a truly liberal society, then he must let everyone in and not complain when the newcomers start to make America over in their image.

Auster proposed a final solution to the problem of Islam in America:

Since Muslims, admitted legally to the U.S., and acting within the law once they are here, have the divinely mandated aim of destroying our system, and can destroy our system, we must respond accordingly. It is not a matter of calling Muslims criminals or terrorists. It is a matter of determining that the religion of Islam is antithetical to our culture and civilization and therefore must, at the least, be severely restricted.

This can be accomplished in two ways. Congress could pass a law declaring that Islam is not a religion in the usual sense but a political movement inherently dangerous to our civilization, our laws, and our liberties. This would remove First Amendment protections from Islam and enable the government to pass further laws regulating, restricting, or even prohibiting Islam. Any such laws would, of course, face continual constitutional challenges.

Which leads to the second and more radical approach. We could pass a Constitutional amendment declaring that, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution and any laws of the United States, the religion of Islam cannot be practiced in the United States. By placing the prohibition of Islam in the Constitution, by saying that Islam is incompatible with our existence as a society, we would be making a fundamental statement about the kind of society America is, and that is precisely the kind of thing that belongs in the Constitution. After the Civil War, slavery was prohibited, not by statute or presidential proclamation, but by an amendment to the Constitution, indicating that slavery has no place in the United States. Up to that point, slavery had been legal in much of the U.S., and during the Civil War had been ended by presidential proclamation under wartime powers. Slavery was only truly extirpated from the U.S. by the Thirteenth Amendment, which superseded all previous laws and all Constitutional protections that had given slavery a place in this country. It is time to think about doing the same with regard to Islam.

With the Thirteenth Amendment as our model, the amendment could be written as follows:

Section 1. The religion taught by the Prophet Muhammad in the Koran and in the Islamic Traditions or Hadiths, and formalized in the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, also known as the Sharia Law, shall not be practiced within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. This article supersedes any contrary provision of this Constitution and of the laws of the United States, and of the constitutions and laws of the several states.

Section 3. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The constitutionality of any laws passed by Congress pursuant to this article shall not be subject to the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.

In 2006, Dennis almost said that the West was at war with Islam. Lawrence Auster wrote:

He says Islam has always been an imperialistic religion, conquering other lands and peoples, and that this is based on the Koran. He then does the kind of thing that critics of Islam should do repeatedly. He establishes the actual connection between Islamic sacred writings (the Koran and the Hadith) and actual Muslim practice, by showing how Muhammad’s command of total war on humanity has been quoted and followed by respected Muslim leaders over the centuries:

The Prophet Muhammad in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Saladin (great 12th-century founder of the Ayyubid dynasty that included Ayyubid Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and much of present-day Saudi Arabia): “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (father of the Islamic revolution in Iran): “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”

Osama bin Laden in November 2001: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say ‘there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.’”

But then having made this powerful and decisive point about Islam, Prager half-throws it away:

We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”

But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.

And here’s how he gets to the bottom of the issue. He cites the opinions of a handful of “moderate” Muslims in the U.S. who argue for a reformed Islam, chiefly the supremely ridiculous Zuhdi Jasser, and on that basis Prager concludes that, yes, Islam can be reformed.