The following story is a rare example of Dennis yelling at a caller.
Dore phoned Dennis Prager’s radio show Dec. 24, 2010: “Dennis, you love the holiday [of Christmas] so much, do you have a Christmas tree in your house?”
Dennis laughs.
Dore: “You are so enamored with it. Why? Do you get enamored with Easter?”
Dennis: “No. I am enamored with Christmas.”
Dore: “Why don’t you become a Christian? You don’t like Chanukkah, right?”
In the past, Dennis described Chanukkah music as “pathetic” in comparison to Christmas music.
Dennis: “Why does liking Christmas as a Jew mean I don’t like Chanukkah?”
Dore: “Why is it so important? If you take away the shmaltz, the music, the tree and everything else, you’ve got a religious holiday?”
Dennis: “Yes. I love the religion of my neighbors. For me, it is not a religious holiday. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ. Is it a national holiday?”
Dore: “Yes. Unfortunately, it is.”
Dennis: “The vast majority of Americans do [observe Christmas]… It is a meaningful day [for most Americans] and I like that and that’s why I live here. I love this country and I love its holidays including Christmas. My colleague Michael Medved is an Orthodox Jew and he plays this Christmas music [on his radio show]. My brother is Orthodox and he sang Christmas carols with a yarmulke with the Columbia’s Glee club. You are insular, we are not… You live in a tiny little ghettoized mind. I don’t.”
Dore: “Do you know the only day that Jews weren’t killed in the concentration camps? Christmas day.”
Dennis: “You’re an ingrate. How many Jews are living in the freest country on earth thanks to American Christians… You are an ingrate, sir.”
Dore: “No, I’m not.”
Dennis: “You are living in the best country Jews have lived in and you are crapping on the Christians who made this country. Why do you continue to live here if you have such a contempt for the Christians who surround you?”
Dore: “I have no contempt for non-Jews. I have contempt for Christmas day.”
Dennis: “Your entire call has been how crappily Christians have treated Jews. Why do you continue to live among Christians when you could live in Tel Aviv among Jews?”
Dore: “If I had the money, I would make aliyah to Israel.”
Six times during the call, Dennis called Dore “an ingrate.”
In a May 1, 2012 speech, Dennis said: “I text my rabbi (Orthodox), ‘Merry Christmas.’ And he texts back, ‘Gut yontif.'”
I asked a goy give me some feedback on my Prager biography.
He replied: Wow, that conversation with “Dore” is fascinating… Prager does seem like a weird sort of Jew–so patriotic. I’ve been trying to formulate an identity map of sorts, like those X/Y-axis politics grids that you see now and then on Facebook. It seems like there’s 1) national identity 2) racial identity 3) religious identity, and 4) personality.
Seems like this could be helpful in sorting. I think Asian-Americans tend to be low in 1, 3, and 4… whites tend to be low in 2 and, increasingly, 4. Blacks low in 1… but among Jews, there is some diversity. And Prager seems to stand alone. [i’m still reading]
–in the ancient world, tribal Jews prayed to their YHWH, and I suppose they assumed everyone else prayed to their own gods… the Athenians prayed to Artemis, or whatever, and the Romans to Jupiter, and so on… the strange thing is that 2000 years later, in the West, there is really only one god to pray to — the YHWH of the Jews — and yet it seems very evident that most Jews would say that the Christians and other gentiles are wasting their time “worshiping” in their characteristic non-Jewish ways. It does frustrate me pretty deeply, to be honest, that I not only do not know–but can not know–the gods and rituals of my deep ancestors. I wonder how Jews feel about Paul, who basically tried to make a one-size-fits-all Judaism… and I wonder whether Paul’s Greekness–overlayed onto his Jewishness–was part of the cause of his… meddling? Like a modern American Jew, his culture surrounded him with gentile objects & customs… and so maybe as a response, he started to hate all things gentile, and preach, with his weird eschatological Jesus, that one needn’t be circumcized to be among G-d’s people.
sorry, digressing… but I guess most Jews would say they don’t think of St. Paul at all, or they kinda despise him? Yet it seems to me that they ought to love him, for basically single-handedly designing a system that would destroy all the native paganisms of the ancient world, and clear the way for…. “Judeo-Christianity.”
I like the parts where Prager says davening & praying bore him… because I feel so the opposite. I think of all institutional religion as like training wheels, and I think of people who still attend as I would think of adults who ride bikes with training wheels. But that aspect of his personality attracts me, because it’s baffling… almost no inner life, apparently. Just: work, be nice, try hard, stay positive.
“I get my values from the Bible” is what all my Southern Baptist students say… Does Prager’s dad remind you of your dad?
Wow! — that stuff about benefiting from a non-Jew’s business error is craaaaazy! Fuck these people. Put that story about returning the electric shaver in the first paragraph. It’s when I read stuff like that and kinda viscerally react that I see how much of a universalist I was raised to be. And it seems like it’s too late to develop my own in-group with a comprehensive set of guidelines about how how many different ways we could screw over out-group people… so all I can do is say, “That’s awful.”
Your style is interesting–never really read anything like it. If anything, there’s not enough of your craziness by usual standards. You’re more like a curator than an essayist here. But it’s good: just an unfiltered distilling of Prager himself, it seems.
Sometimes I think a serious man needs a mentor as he’s coming into manhood or adulthood, and in modern America, that relationship–which is almost archetypal, with parallels back to Greek philosophy or ancient India–is somehow impossible or out of fashion. You found Prager though.
