A Biography of Dennis Prager by Luke Ford (Part 1)

Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Dennis Prager entered public life in 1970 as a lecturer to Jewish groups. Over the next five decades and through three marriages, he published eleven books including The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism (1976), Why The Jews? The Reason For Antisemitism (1982), Think A Second Time (1996), Happiness Is A Serious Problem (1998), Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (2012) and The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code (2015). He began his broadcasting career over KABC in 1982. 

By Luke Ford

Dennis Prager’s Parents

Dennis Prager‘s father Max Prager (born July 18, 1918, died Aug. 16, 2014) published his autobiography at MaxPrager.com. 

Max wrote in chapter one:

…[T]he family name “Prager” was originally established for those who inhabited the city of Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. Because of the usual anti-Semitism, the Jews fled to England and to Germany. In the eighteenth century, Poland had a king who looked favorably on the immigration of Jews to his land, partially due to the Jews’ expertise in finance. Consequently, the Pragers emigrated from England and Germany to Poland along with their co-religionists.

My father, Beresh, was born in 1878 in Yadow, Poland to Mendel and Chana Prager… My mother Ruchel was born in Ostrawa-Macziwesk in 1878 to Avraham Moshe and Sura Walberg.

On his radio show Apr. 9, 2012, Dennis Prager said in reaction to the murders of blacks in Tulsa by two white men: “My great grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father was murdered by a black man [burglar]. I never recall anybody in my family thinking that it was then appropriate to kill a black.”

On July 16, 2013, Dennis said: “It was a trauma. He was beaten over the head by a lamp and his skull was smashed. They caught the man in Georgia.”

In his twenties, Dennis found out that his father’s sister (Irene) committed suicide before Dennis was born. (Oct. 23, 2009)

Max Prager wrote: “After walking one block, they informed me that my sister Irene had taken her life during the night by leaping off the roof of the apartment building in which my family resided; Irene had her birthday that same week reaching the age of 32. Upon hearing this tragic news, I was not able to walk any further and immediately sat down on the stoop of the nearest building in complete shock.”

After his death, Max was eulogized by his oldest son Kenneth: “His life was long and rich in meaning, happiness and joy… My father led a truly charmed life… He was blessed with good looks. He was tall. He was very smart. He was athletic. He had an incredible memory. He had a wonderful personality… He was the last of four children born to a very poor family. His father was a tailor. His father was in and out of businesses. The oldest of his siblings couldn’t afford to go to college. They had to work. By the time he was ready to go to college, he could go to City College.”

Dennis Prager‘s parents were born and raised in Brooklyn a few blocks from each other.

Max wrote in chapter eleven that he met his future wife at a party in Borough Park:

…I found the mystery woman staring at me throughout the ride home. I must admit that I thought she was lovely but nothing beyond that feeling. I, later on, learned that she told her mother that night that she met a young man whom she would marry, and she did. This occurred in June 1936 when I was 18 and just finished my freshman year.

…On Simchas Torah 1936, I told my mother that I was going to change the place of attendance of hakofes (seven rounds of marching with Torah scrolls) by going to the Hebrew Educational Society. I had never attended hakofes at the HES so perhaps it was berschert (destined) that I do so now. When I entered the lobby, I met Florence Zivits who told me that she is awaiting Hilda Friedfeld for hakofes. I inquired as to who was Hilda Friedfeld. She replied that she was the girl who declaimed in Boro Park and I immediately remembered her. As we walked outside the building, Hilda’s sister Esther and her friend Esther Zomick approached us and informed us that Hilda was on her way to the HES.

When Hilda arrived, I was stricken with her class, clothing and demeanor. She was even more beautiful than when I last saw her. We went in for hakofes and, after about an hour, I asked her if she would like to take a walk with me. She said yes and we walked for about 30 minutes and finally sat down on a bench in a little park at the beginning of Pitkin Ave. At the time, I was wearing glasses and after staring at her for several minutes, I removed my glasses and said: “You are a very pretty girl.” She began to laugh, which she did quite often. Her laughter intrigued me, as I was accustomed to living in a very serious household.

Max Prager married Hilda Friedfeld on September 14, 1940.

Max wrote:

I, personally, paid for flowers, photos, orchestra and the rabbi. Although both our parents were Orthodox, we had mixed seating for the chupa and the meal. We also had mixed dancing for Hebrew and Yiddish songs; but we had no social dancing.

We never had a honeymoon although we made up for it many times in the future. …[H]er father could not look us in the face. Evidently he felt I had defiled a daughter of his for the first time since Hilda was the first child who was married. My mother-in-law who always loved me embraced and kissed me. That night we went to Radio City Music Hall and enjoyed for the first time marital bliss. I remember as though it was yesterday that we felt as though we were walking on air. Whether it was our first day as husband and wife or it was the result of our first sexual experience, or both, I really cannot explain. 

…On August 2, 1948, we were blessed with our second son, Dennis Mark. I always wanted a daughter because of the affection that my brother’s daughter displayed towards Murray; more than his two sons displayed towards him. I liked the name ‘Denise” and if we were to have a daughter that was the name we would give her. So when our son arrived I told Hilda that we would name him Dennis. He was a doll from birth, lovable and extremely happy. He did not inherit his brother’s habit of crying constantly; although Kenny did so because of infections in his ears.

In …1955, Hilda decided to spread her wings and return to a career. When we were going “steady”, she emphatically stated to me that if and when we would marry, she would want a large family and I, of course, agreed with her. After our marriage, she sang a different tune repeatedly informing me that her ideal life would be a career, no children and living in Manhattan. 

…Hilda loved to travel, get out of the house, and especially play the slot machines in various casinos. If I would say to her at midnight or later, “Hil let’s go”, she would reply “I’m already dressed”. We went numerous times to Las Vegas and stayed at Caesars Palace and she would stay at the slot machines to the early hours of the morning. She also enjoyed the shows that the various hotels had to offer. Every time we went to Vegas we visited Dennis and his family in California. We also went several times to the Bahamas while in Florida, to gamble at the casinos. I, personally, was not an avid gambler but went along because I knew that Hilda enjoyed this pastime. It is possible that her desire to gamble was genetic since her father loved to play the stock market and play cards with his friends. Also her sister, Chippy-alias Corinne- played the market and loved gambling. Years later, when we ceased going to Vegas, she would say to me at least twice a year “Mac, let’s go to Atlantic City”. She would play many hours while I would get bored and retire to the bar to smoke a cigar and drink beer.

Max Prager wrote in chapter sixteen:

I remember leaving for work with her every morning, stopping at a diner for breakfast, sitting next to her on the subway, arriving at our respective stations and not a word passed between us. When I returned home after a day’s work, I was served my dinner in complete silence.

…Many times I would attempt to begin a conversation and was always rebuffed. Two or three weeks would elapse before we recommenced conversing.

After suffering for about one year and being completely at a loss of a solution to this very grave problem, I turned to her father for advice. I expected him to recognize the severity of our marital discord and tell me that he would speak to her and have her change her ways. He floored me when he laughed and said: “She is the image of her mother; I’ve been living with this problem all my life.” I was in a less jocular mood and replied that if she did not change, his daughter would be returning to his household very shortly; since we were still childless I would not hesitate for one moment in seeking a divorce. In very emphatic terms I repeated this ultimatum to my wife.

Evidently, Hilda realized that Mac was very much in earnest and would not hesitate to enforce his threat. She immediately ceased her childish behavior and became the loving companion that she was prior to the marriage and has never repeated her silent treatment of me regardless of any disagreement or dispute that followed throughout our marriage.

…Fortunately, the episodes of our strong disagreements were very rare and our sons were spared a home filled with discord. In fact, they told us when they were teenagers that they hoped to emulate their parents’ relationship when they married.

On his show Aug. 31, 2011, Dennis said: “My father tells the story that when he met my mother, he had a strange form of lisp or some other speech impediment. And one day she made fun of it. And that ended [the lisp].”

April 3, 2008, Dr. Stephen Marmer said: “The only person I know who can so dominate a room that even Dennis can’t get a word in edgewise is his father Max.”

In a letter he wrote for his wife in case he died before her, Max wrote: “I can never forget what you said to me when you were only seventeen years of age. ‘Mac, if we will marry and have children, you will always be number one.’ Not many wives feel that way. Most importantly, you kept that promise.”

Feb. 14, 2014, Dennis said: “When you have a good relationship with a spouse, that is the relationship that can provide the most happiness. I don’t think it is sufficient but it was for my father and mother.”

Jan. 5, 2010, Dennis said: “Contrary to Freud, I never had the desire to kill either one of my parents.”

Birth

Hilda was born October 24, 1919. She died September 19, 2009. She gave birth to Kenneth on January 3, 1943 and to Dennis Mark aka Shmuel on August 2, 1948.

On the day Dennis was born, “Woody Wood-Pecker” by Kay Kyser was America’s number one song and Sprinter Mel Patton was on the cover of Time magazine.

No other famous person was born on this day.

According to Yougov.com, in the first quarter of 2023, Dennis Prager was the eleventh most popular columnist and the 2513th most popular person in the world. 

June 18, 2012, Dennis said he did not understand those who booked a photographer to record a birth. “Who do you want to show it to?”

“I did not want to see my birth and I am not interested to see my children’s birth.”

“There’s part of me that rebels against, ‘Everything must be recorded.’ And I have a video diary.”

According to Dennis, his parents gave little thought to his name. “They wanted a girl. They already had a boy. They knew they were only going to have two. They were going to name the girl Denise. That’s how I got the name Dennis. There was no other thought.” (1995 lecture on Exodus 6)

“I was never read a fairy tale or children’s stories. I did read Crime and Punishment at age 11.” (Sept. 26, 2013)

“My parents are a fascinating amalgamation of modern American and traditional Judaism,” said Dennis. “Both grew up with European Jewish parents. My father’s parents didn’t even speak English, only Yiddish.

“My whole family was in America during the Holocaust… If my grandparents hadn’t moved to this country, I would never have been born. My parents would have been gassed.” (C-SPAN Booknotes, Nov. 21, 1995)

Sept. 15, 2022, Dennis said: “My father wrote his [undergraduate] thesis on American anti-semitism. He said he was the luckiest Jew whoever lived being a Jew in America. I was taught to appreciate [America]. I’m sorry to say, most of my fellow Jews are ingrates with regard to America.”

According to a family joke, Max joined the Navy during World Way II to get away from the crying of Kenneth.

Infancy

Max Prager wanted to have more kids but Hilda did not, possibly because of the trauma associated with Dennis’s first two months. (MaxPrager.com)

Dennis said his mother smoke and drank while she was pregnant with him. (May 26, 2011)

Both of his parents smoked. “I would get sick when my father would smoke a cigar in the car with the windows up. I would throw up.” (Feb. 27, 2014)

Max Prager wrote about Dennis in chapter 23:

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 Dec. 1, 2010. “That was my diet as a kid. I get sick every other year for about three days.”

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.”

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.”

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, Brooklyn, NY 11229. 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 it 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)

Said Dennis Dec. 22, 2010: “The last time I wrote a letter was in summer camp. I was away eight weeks. On the bus to camp, I would write all eight weeks worth of letters, postcards, to my parents. ‘Having a great time!’ And I would date it for the next week. I assure you I was not the only one to do it.”

February 13, 2023, Dennis said: “I’ve never had a female friend.”

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)

Said Dennis in a 1995 lecture on Exodus 2: “My parents spoke Yiddish. They used it for secrets. I didn’t learn to speak almost any Yiddish.”

Moses was Dennis’s favorite Biblical character.

He called his parents “mommy and daddy.” (May 3, 2012)

Dennis said 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.

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.

Loving 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…”

Mar. 28, 2014, Dennis said: “My parents were not emotionally expressive toward my brother and me. That created certain very important things in me, a lot of inner strength and ability to have thick skin to criticism.”

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.”

Dennis Prager felt like an orphan and couldn’t wait to get away from his home.

Aug. 2, 2022, Dennis said: “I didn’t think they [parents] loved me when I was a kid… I didn’t fly once with my parents. I didn’t want to do much with my family.”

“What I did was develop antibodies. I was vaccinated against emotional problems. Starting in sixth grade, I sought love from guy friends. From sixth grade to today, I’ve always had guy friends. Love is love. Who it comes from is secondary. Starting at age 14 to today, I’ve been happy. I didn’t have a happy childhood, but I had a happy adolescence.”

June 6, 2023, Dennis said: “My parents were not warm to my brother and me. That was not uncommon in the WWII generation. They were transformed when they became grandparents. They became loving and warm.”

July 3, 2023, Dennis said: “They were not hugging. They were not verbally warm. At an early age, it was extremely important to me to have children. I wanted to have a loving parent-child relationship and I was right. It filled the hole that I had from my childhood.”

June 21, 2022, Dennis said to his Youtube cohost Julie Hartman: “My desire to bring them pride in me was not a big factor. They, like many other people of their generation in ethnic life, the amount of love the child got was in direct proportion to how much pride they brought their parents. I resented that. So I wasn’t aiming to bring them pride.”

Aug. 29, 2012: “That’s the reason I became something, because my parents said at an early age, ‘You’re on your own. Have a great life.’ And I’ve had a great life. And it wasn’t easy.” 

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.”

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.”

This family would give Dennis the affection he didn’t get at home. 

“My Aunt Pearl would take me to so many places. My father’s sister, Anne, who had no children of her own, I got to go to Radio City Hall thanks to her. My mother’s sister, Pearl, would take me to the stamp show, which was one of the highlights of my years as a child. My uncle Murray would visit from Schenectady and I got more love from him than I experienced at home most of the time.”

Dennis said Dec. 30, 2010: “How much of my childhood was unprogrammed. I remember visiting my grandparents for the Sabbath. In the afternoon after synagogue, my grandparents would take a nap. I was left with about three hours with nothing to do… I loved visiting them. I wasn’t a reader then. I was eight, nine years old.

“I sat with the chair that was at the piano. I just took the swivel chair and I would imagine I was a New York city bus driver and the seat was the steering wheel. I’d announce what street we were at. I’d open the door for passengers. There was no TV. There was no electronic entertainment.”

“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?”

Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on Leviticus 19: “My father was the president of the synagogue we attended. I remember only a few things from that period, but one of them was how constantly he would say, ‘It’s the ones we give free memberships to who complain the most.’”

Childhood

Dennis did not begin to speak until he was almost four. Max remembers a Yom Kippur appeal at synagogue when Dennis was five. “People were giving thousands and hundreds [of dollars]. And this five year old child raises his hand and says, ‘I want to give $5.’ The synagogue broke up laughing. This showed the compassion Dennis always had.” (Prager CD released in 1998)

Max Prager wrote in chapter 26:

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.

Dennis: “I spoke so late that my grandfather thought I was retarded. Whenever I’m asked how come you spoke so late, I say, ‘I was waiting to get paid.'” (Lecture on Lev. 19:12-16)

Dennis said in his January 2002 lecture on his intellectual autobiography:

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?

Dennis wrote April 18, 2012 in the Jewish Journal:

That [the Holocaust] 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.

April 9, 2013, Dennis said: “Because I’ve felt very blessed much of my life, I felt I could take on the problems of the world. If you have huge personal problems, then you are understandably preoccupied with that and not these big issues.”

“The Bronx Zoo had an exhibit once that said, ‘The most dangerous animal in the world.’ You walked in and there was a big mirror. I agreed with that. And we can be the most beautiful.”

Said Dennis in a 2010 lecture on Leviticus 26, 27: “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. 

“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.”

March 18, 2011, Dennis said: “I hate school bullies so much that I got routinely kicked out of class because I would punch bullies. I hate bullies. Always did. That’s why I hate big government — it’s the ultimate bully.”

July 6, 2022, Dennis said to his Youtube cohost: “I don’t know what I have learned morally that I didn’t know in fifth grade. I can’t think of a single moral insight.”

In an April 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said about his obsession with evil: “I take credit for having some courage and for devoting my life hopefully to good things. I don’t take any credit for what is built in. It is utterly built in, my preoccupation with evil.”

June 21, 2022, Dennis said to his Youtube cohost Julie Hartman: “At a very early age, aside from wanting to do good and to influence people to do good, I wanted to understand life. I had this ambition that I would live a long life and would understand at least as well as anybody whoever lived. One of the reasons I thought I had a chance, I have no prejudices. There was no dogma I had to meet. I confronted life straight on. I didn’t have to prove anything because I am an American, a Jew, a male, a white. Nothing mattered except what is true. I never read anything with an agenda other than is it true and will it make a good world. I wasn’t burdened by [psychological] problems in my thought such as anger at men or anger at women… There was no Dennis for Dennis. My greatest role model was my father. My father was a strong presence. He wasn’t a particularly loving presence… My bigggest supporters are individuals, not groups.”

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

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…

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?”

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 in 1998).

From an early age, gurus like Dennis know “that they were gifted with special insight from an early age which was often misdiagnosed as learning disabilities. They have a special way of viewing the world and they are special people.”

March 11, 20211, Dennis said: “I went to a religious school. There was no bullying.” 

“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.”

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.

“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.

On July 25, 2012, Dennis said: “When I was in elementary school, my parents sent me for four weeks at a time to visit my wonderful aunt in Florida [Aunt and Uncle Corrine and Al Moskowitz]. I missed four weeks of school in fifth grade. So what?”

Dennis Prager wrote June 10, 2008:

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.

Max Prager wrote in chapter 27:

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.”

Apr. 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.

As a child, Dennis was impressed by the way his father regularly called his mother. “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, 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 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)

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.” (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)

June 3, 2011, Dennis said: “I 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.”

May 21, 2010, Dennis said: “Whatever gifts I had, they were not obvious when I was a child. When I was eight, people were not lining up to listen to me speak. They were when I was a teenager.” (May 21, 2010)

An awkward kid who resembled the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Dennis was always taller and rounder than his roommates. His parents, by contrast, with their charm and charisma reminded many of the Kennedys. Dennis was a fan of JFK and adopted his accent for a time (Nov. 11, 2013).

July 7, 2010, Dennis said: “I think my parents complimented me three times before I left home at age 21… I don’t know what I would have been praised about as a kid? ‘Hello, Dennis, we like your tummy. It’s really nice to see what a roly-poly child we have. You eat well.’ I think that could’ve been the single biggest compliment my parents would’ve paid me when I was in elementary school. I had no talent. There was nothing impressive about me.”

Dennis was derided by his parents for lack of effort. “My father used to say: ‘If Dennis can sit, why stand? If stand, why walk? If walk, why run?’” (Feb. 4, 2010)

“I am no different from any lazy person, but I was never given a damn thing,” said Dennis Mar. 19, 2010. “Ever. Ever. I was given nothing without working. Nothing except room and board in my parents’ house until I was 20 years old.”

May 16, 2010, Dennis said: “I don’t think so [that a good elementary and high school would motivate an otherwise unmotivated student to become a good student]. I didn’t want to do schoolwork. I wanted to go home and to do what I wanted to do. I was so abnormal… I would listen to short-wave radio broadcasts and learn how to conduct symphonies. The more I look back at my childhood, the more I realize there’s nothing to be learned from my childhood. I was a freak. I’m 15 years old and where’s Dennis? He’s at the New York Philharmonic Library learning how to self-conduct scores… I almost never talk about my youth in that way because there’s nothing to be learned. I was abnormal… But I had a good time. I laughed through three of my four years at high school.”

“I used to call myself Prager,” said Dennis Feb. 10, 2010. “Now I call myself Dennis.”

May 21, 2010, Dennis said to a caller: “Did you say Pragez? I have few very nicknames but that’s one of my favorites.”

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.”

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.

Dennis: “I remember the crime rates were horrific. It was frightening to be there. I was frightened as a child. I remember every day the horrible news that would come out.” (Nov. 6, 2013)

Dennis was unhappy until age 11, when he discovered he had a destiny.

Dennis: “I remember when I started feeling happy. It was in the sixth grade. I was very unhappy until then. I went on my own every day on the subway and I felt like the captain of a ship.”

“I can tap in now to the exhilaration I felt then.” (Aug. 31, 2012)

“There is one thing I do frequently think about from elementary school and that was in sixth grade taking the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I went to school in Manhattan that year. That was a statement that I made to myself — I am an independent human being. I can travel for an hour each way in the morning and the evening, go on trains, go on buses, on my own. I thought I could conquer the world.”

“Sixth grade is all I remember from elementary school. I don’t remember seventh and eighth. I went back to a school near the house so there was nothing to be proud of.” (Nov. 11, 2009)

In a Spring 1999 series on male sexuality, Dennis said: “When I grew up, I had Christian-envy. They’re so lucky. They get all the rewards of their religion just by believing in Jesus. I have to keep all these laws. I can’t drive on Shabbat. I can’t eat half the foods. I have all these prohibitions. They have none of them. All they have to do is believe. I believed that into my mid-thirties. Then I met the people I was ignorant of. I got very involved with inter-religious dialogue. One of the things that I learned was that Christians have it tougher. Whereas Judaism has more prohibitions on behavior, Christianity has far more prohibitions on thought. I can more easily deal with prohibitions on behavior.”

November 14, 2022, Dennis said: “I know how much this [course] affected my brilliant wife [Sue] before we married. And it has made for a happier marriage because she understands male sexuality. “

“Lust means what when a man sees an attractive woman, he has an erotic reaction. That is built into me. God made it. I didn’t choose it.”

Prager’s Youtube cohost Julie Hartman: “Why do you think God implanted that in us?”

Dennis: “That’s what gives us our energy. If you met a man with a minimal sex drive, I promise you that he would not radiate energy, masculinity. That’s me. I have a ton of energy and I am a very sexual being. I am faithful. I’ve been married before. I was faithful then. That’s the vow I take. If you are not going to be faithful, don’t get married. That drive is a big part of my own energy… My dark side is in the erotic realm. If I had bad thoughts about torturing animals or abusing children, I would feel plagued by having bad thoughts.”

November 7, 2022, Dennis said: “I went to Morocco [1968 for two weeks]. Virtually every woman was completely covered. I didn’t see any part of a female for two weeks. I monitored me. I felt deadened compared to the way I was in Europe. Part of me thought this was a healthier thing. I got to Portugal. Girls are in mini skirts and tank tops. I remember thinking this may be too much skin but I’ll take this over the alternative. Sex is life. This is life. I came to see and I have never veered from this point — young women showing their bodies is a life force.”

When his parents limited his TV watching, Dennis asked them what he should do with his evenings. They told him to take up a musical instrument. Prager looked up Musical Instruction in the Yellow Pages and settled on the first instrument he saw — accordion. After his parents bought him one for $135, he took lessons from Peter Luisietti whose studio resided under the subway at Kings Highway.

“Accordion has been useless given that my first love is classical music. Bach wrote nothing for the accordion. Mozart, nada. Beethoven, zilch. That’s how life’s forks happen… I wish I had gone down the list and played a classical thing and then joined an orchestra. Maybe my life would’ve been different? Maybe now I’d be in some orchestra talking to the players while I wasn’t playing, while the violins were playing, I’d be giving my theories on life to my fellow trumpeter. Folks, if I weren’t doing this on the air, I’d be doing it privately.” (Mar. 2, 2011)

June 22, 2010, Dennis said: “From six grade on, I always had a best friend and they were always lifesavers. I can name them. In sixth grade, it was Leon Fink. I raised that issue years ago and I found out that he had died in his fifties. It broke my heart. I learned about it on the radio. In seventh and eighth grade, it was Gerald Klein. And then Joseph Telushkin from high school on.”

Jan. 27, 2012, Dennis said: “After playing hockey in our socks in my father’s basement, the floor was linoleum so we could slide, he [Joseph] didn’t like the fact that I checked him. I was 6’4”, even in high school. He objected to playing hockey if checking was allowed. That was our first disagreement and one of our only ones. We talked about girls and hockey and the ultimate issues of life.

“We used to sit in my car after going bowling at midnight and then sit in my car in freezing weather before I dropped him off at his graduate school dorm in Manhattan, and we’d talk about ethical monotheism.”

April 3, 2008, Rabbi Telushkin said: “Dennis would always call me rabbi. I was 15. I wasn’t even planning to become a rabbi. Dennis would speak of what he would do one day in the Senate. Dennis has done wonderful things, but I look forward one day to calling him, “Mr. Senator’, if not higher.”

On Dec. 23, 2013, Dennis said: “That’s exactly the type of politician I want — the guy who doesn’t want to be in politics and feels drafted by total moral issues, [not] just knows from the age of 12 I want to be a politician. When I meet those kids, I get an eery feeling.”

He gets an eery feeling because he’s met someone like himself? 

Jan. 10, 2014, Dennis said: “There are people who are to power what the heroin addict is to heroin. They cannot have enough of it. It changes their personality, it changes their demeanor, it changes their values. I don’t personally relate to it because I want to have influence, not power. I have no interest in it. I have as much interest in power as I have in heroin.”

In the third lecture of his series “A New Pair Of Glasses,” Chuck Chamberlain recalled that before sobriety he felt that “anybody with my ability should be at least a senator if not president of the United States and here I was in the fixture business and it was obvious to me that I was the only one around there who had any brains and the boss had all the money and he would tell me what to do and the injustice of the situation would cause me to do a little drinking.”

In a 1995 lecture on Exodus 5, Dennis Prager said: “The word for servant and the word for slave is the same [in the Torah], which is probably why to this day that Jews don’t like to be servants because they think it is slavery. Did you ever meet a Jewish waiter? Jews don’t wait. That and the Chosen People notion are the reasons why Jews don’t want to serve anybody.”

Anyone who earns a living does it by serving people. 

Big Brother Kenny

Dennis and Kenneth suffered from bronchitis into their teens. (Max Prager, chapter 24)

Nov. 10, 2010, Dennis said: “When I was a kid, I was very scared of monster movies. My older brother said to me, ‘Dennis, you want to stop being scared of monster movies? Go and watch as many as you can.’ And I did. I took his advice. Gradually, monster movies became funny. I was inured. They were no longer monsters. They were a movie. I was seeing the make-up and the sound effects. Most things are not scary once you know them.”

Sep. 22, 2011, Dennis said: “My brother had a very big impact on me. Bigger than he can know. He was a godlike figure. He was six years older than I. He was a moral model. A successful model. There were things I saw that were sad. He has a sadness in him. It’s part of his nature. It spurred me. I’ll never forget my brother announced one day, I just visited my 20th country.

“I was a teenager. I had not been anywhere but Canada and I said to myself, I am going to visit more countries than my brother. I’ve now visited 100. Every time, I say, I beat him.”

Says Dennis: “There’s nothing like having an older brother to beat. He was like everything.” (Jan. 21, 2013)

Apr. 1, 2014, Dennis said: “I think the ratio of pictures of my older brother to pictures of me was 10-1.”

“My brother loves Ecclesiastes. I think that anyone who has read Ecclesiastes and doesn’t want to kill himself has not read it carefully.” (March 17, 2013 on Hugh Hewitt)

Kenny graduated from Yeshiva University High School of Brooklyn in June 1960. In his senior year, he was class valedictorian, student body president, editor of the school newspaper, and starting center of the school’s basketball team.

“I never competed,” said Dennis.

June 23, 2010, Dennis said: “Until [my brother left for college], everything that occurred in the home, including cleaning the table, who can do it faster, was competition. On the Sabbath, in my home we would sing Sabbath melodies at the table. We’d have a competition to see who could sing faster without missing one word in Hebrew. We had a stopwatch and we’d time it. There was no area of life where there wasn’t competition. And if you lost, you weren’t crushed.”

May 21, 2010, Dennis said: “My brother came home from the first week at Columbia and he was very down. And I said, ‘Kenny, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘Dennis, I just met 700 other captains of basketball teams, valedictorians and editors of high school newspapers. And some of them play the oboe.’”

Controlling Your Emotions

Mar. 15, 2010, Dennis Prager said, “You do a kid a favor [by threatening to hit him if he does not stop crying]. My mother used to say that. It was one of her great lines. Well, I don’t know if it was great, but it was one of her fairly frequent lines — ‘I’ll give you something to cry about’. And I stopped crying. And I learned at a very early age, I can control my emotions. I can control my behavior, which is about the single best lesson you can give a human being in terms of happiness and a good life, that they can control themselves.”

Dennis said that people of lesser fortitude would’ve broken under the rigor of Max’s parentage. “‘Taking the easy way out’ was a phrase my father frequently used. It was a little overdone in my house. He thought that glasses were the easy way out. I explained that I really need them.” (Mar. 15, 2013)

One of Max’s favorite sayings was, “It’s only pain.” (Aug. 30, 2013)

“I went through a period (his teens) where I hated my parents,” said Dennis in a 2009 lecture on “Feelings: Key to the Liberal Mind.”

In a 1994 lecture on Gen. 50, Dennis said: “It is a rare parent who wants to know all the details and it is a foolish child who tells all the details even though they know it is not necessary…and it might hurt them, such as about their sex life. Kids who don’t follow in the exact religious ways of their parents — do they have to announce to them, ‘I run my home differently than you do’ and hurt their feelings? There might be certain acts you put on to make them happy. With a family, ‘Let it all out!’ is a ludicrous principle. It is foolish to live an act but you don’t need to announce who you slept with last night.”

Bar Mitzvah

At his Bar Mitzvah, Dennis recited the Torah portions of Mattos and Masei at the end of the book of Numbers) at Camp Winsoki on July 15, 1961. As a gift, 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.”

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.

Sports

Under pressure from his father to become more athletic, Dennis joined the Flatbush Falcons basketball team. At 6’4, he was the tallest kid in the school. While looking at Dennis, the coach announced that his new squad “scraped the bottom of the barrel.” He was right.

In a March 17, 2013 dialogue with Hugh Hewitt, Dennis said: “I have no interest in basketball. I love hockey. There was no yeshiva hockey team. The things about basketball I was not good at were dribbling, shooting, passing and rebounding… Bad news. The team is losing by so much [at Madison Square Garden] that mathematically we have no chance to win the game. With 58 seconds to go, the coach decides to put me in the game. I know nothing of what is going on. I whisper to Snack Bar as soon as I get the tap, ‘Snack Bar, which basket are we shooting at?’ I’m in a slow panic.

“I chose number 13 because I’m a joker. I hear over the Madison Square Garden intercom, ‘Now coming in for Flatbush, number 13, Stanley Prager.’ Nothing is going right. I get in the game. I’m a little panic struck and sure enough, I run to the wrong side after the tap ball. I’m alone with the referee and he says, ‘Hey kid, are you some sort of shmuck?’

“There’s always been a part of me that sees me from outside of me and inside thought, ‘Yeah, I am some sort of shmuck.'”

“When I ran to the wrong side in Madison Square Garden, my mother was cheering. I remember thinking that my mother would cheer if I sat down and played checkers in the middle of the game. My father thought, ‘What’s wrong with him? My kid ran to the wrong basket.'”

Feb. 18, 2010, Dennis said: “The thought that my father would’ve showed up to every one of my basketball games, I would’ve been embarrassed. I thought that I was already a man in some ways and mommy and daddy didn’t have to watch me.”

“They came to one game, which is its own story, my embarrassing one minute at Madison Square Garden before a Knicks game [when Prager ran towards the wrong basket] in high school. My mother was yelling the whole time, ‘Dennis! Dennis!’ I hoped that none of my teammates heard this.”

“I had a pop-up hit to me,” said Dennis. “I was about eleven. My brother threw a hard ball high in the air. I didn’t have to run for it. I put my glove up. And it went right by my glove, hit my nose, and I bled more than I have ever bled in my life. On a simple pop-up.” (April 21, 2010)

In a Feb. 25, 2012 public dialogue with Adam Carolla, Dennis said: “You know why they didn’t fingerprint parents [who wanted to coach] when we were kids? Because they never came to our games. Why do you have to go to all of your kids’ events? I didn’t want my parents to come to my events. It made me feel like a man that mommy wasn’t watching. That was independence. I was a grown-up.”

Adam: “Even when you lost your virginity, you did not want them anywhere around? Even for encouragement? ‘Come on, you’re a Prager, son!'”

Dennis: “I went to Orthodox Jewish schools until I was 18. It was not an issue.”

Oct. 27, 2010, Dennis said: “I remember in camp when I would play baseball and if the girls showed up, I tried much harder than if there were no girls watching. If the girls came, it was like I was Popeye and I had just consumed spinach.”

Not Normal

Nov. 7, 2014, Dennis said the first hardcover book he ever bought was as a teenager — Soviet Foreign Propaganda by Frederick Barghoom. “I was always curious what the people who don’t agree with me think. How do they sell their ideas to themselves and to others?”

A caller to Prager’s radio show Jan. 23, 2009, said she heard that during eighth grade, Dennis brought a ham radio on the school bus and announced to everyone that he would learn Russian by the end of the semester.

“That sounds like me. I was not a normal eighth grader,” Prager said.

April 5, 2013, Dennis said: “Why did I learn to read Pravda in high school? I taught myself Russian and with a dictionary would read Pravda. I loved reading those who told the opposite of truth. It’s a strange fascination I have with those who distort reality eloquently, which has been the left’s job for over 100 years.”

Aug. 30, 2011, Dennis said: “There is a subject that has troubled me my whole thinking life, which began on my 14th birthday. Before 14, I did not think. Not the actual act but the reactions to it have plagued me. I’m talking about the United States decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. I’ve always been morally at peace with the decision. It is now de rigeur to lump Hiroshima with Auschwitz, as though they are moral equivalents.”

Promoting Goodness

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 1995)

“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)

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.”

Yearning to promote God and goodness, Dennis stumbled upon an endeavor where his group were the best because they brought ethical monotheism into the world. 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 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.”