A Biography of Dennis Prager by Luke Ford (Part 3)

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.

Nov. 11, 2009, Dennis said: “I can’t believe…how often my high school years come to my mind. I’m amazed. I almost feel silly. That is not yesterday. It’s almost as if my life is high school and today. I’ve gone from high school to right now. I know there are decades intervening but it beats me what happened. Oh yeah, I had kids. I’ve been married. I’ve got a radio show. I wrote four books. None of that. High school!”

In tenth grade, while walking to a bookstore about half a mile from Flatbush, Prager met Joseph Telushkin. They became best friends.

“Neither Joseph nor I actually did school work. But we read all the time, and became inseparable, as we talked and talked about God, evil, Judaism, the Holocaust and girls.” One day Joseph told Dennis, “I’ve done a survey and found that one out of every ten thoughts a guy has isn’t about girls.” (CD)

April 3, 2008, Dennis said: “I was more Americanized than his parents. Joseph’s mother’s reaction to me when we first met, she said to him [privately], ‘He’s very charming but is he deep?’ I am Mr. Enthusiast and conquer the world.”

Flatbush put an end to mixed-sex dances in Prager’s 10th grade. Still, they had a senior prom, something no yeshiva would have today.

“I took the salutatorian to the Senior prom,” said Dennis Jan. 5, 2010. “And I finished in the bottom 20% of my class, which shows you how far charm can get a guy.”

“I was blessed with wisdom at an early age,” said Dennis June 28, 2010. “I knew at an early age that doing well in high school would not amount to a hill of beans. On the bulletin board, they would publish the rankings. They didn’t care about humiliation. The guy who finished 120th out of 120 ended up as the head of the Miami Board of Education.”

“I have a strong sense of dignity. I did in high school too. The biggest reason I didn’t cheat on tests was dignity. I felt like I was groveling to ask another kid.”

In the 2011 movie Baseball, Dennis and the French, Dennis said: “I had one notebook for all four years of [high school], which I never filled with a single homework exercise.”

The Yeshiva of Flatbush divided its students into four tracks. Prager and Telushkin were assigned to the C-student track because, though smart, they wouldn’t do homework.

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.”

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… I can not remember the simple one-sentence prayer from the 1962 [Supreme Court] ruling.” 

Joseph struck his classmates as smart and articulate. Descending from a long line of rabbis, Telushkin surprised no one by becoming an Orthodox rabbi.

Dennis, by contrast, was considered a loudmouth by his schoolmates, who, by and large, haven’t changed that evaluation. He did not strike his classmates as particularly religious and few thought he’d go on to be a moral leader. They saw that he desperately needed female attention. They were not surprised when he bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend and from marriage to marriage.

Jan. 15, 2024, Dennis said: “My parents had two sons. I have two sons. My son David had two sons. My [third] wife has two sons. My parents were pre-occupied with each other. They paid little attention to me. They paid more attention to my older brother because he was the first born and he was a tremendous pride-provider. He was the best at everything. Valedictorian. Captain of the basketball team. Editor of the school newspaper. Got into Columbia. He was a nachas machine. They didn’t shower me with love. They didn’t hug me. They didn’t say I love you. They were not coddling or warm… My parents did not live through their kids… I started living in high school not to make my parents proud. I didn’t want to make them ashamed. It was so liberating.”

“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)

July 17, 2023, Dennis said to Julie Hartman: “I realized at an early age what I was going to bring differently to the religious-secular discussion. I am quite religious but I don’t wear it heavily. It drove me crazy that most religious people smack you in the face with their religiosity. It’s not good for religion and it is not good for them. On one of my first trips to Israel, I was about 20 years old, I was at the army headquarters in Tel Aviv, and all these soldiers were my age, and we were talking and this female soldier said to me, ‘Are you religious?’ In Israel, [asking] if you are religious means are you Orthodox. I said, I don’t know if I am religious, I only know that I am not secular. She said, ‘If you are religious, why aren’t you wearing a kipa?’ I said, I don’t think religion needs a uniform… That’s why I didn’t become a rabbi. I could’ve gotten religious ordination… I learned more than most rabbis do.”

February 6, 2023, Dennis said: “I was [22]. I broke up with an Israeli woman. One of the brightest and kindness human beings I knew, but I wasn’t attracted to her physically. It was one of five times in my life that I cried.”

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.’”

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.”

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.”

Cheating

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 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 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.”

The desire to get into an Ivy League school is rational. As Steven Pinker wrote in 2014:

The economist Caroline Hoxby has shown that selective universities spend twenty times more on student instruction, support, and facilities than less selective ones, while their students pay for a much smaller fraction of it, thanks to gifts to the college. Because of these advantages, it’s the selective institutions that are the real bargains in the university marketplace. Holding qualifications constant, graduates of a selective university are more likely to graduate on time, will tend to find a more desirable spouse, and will earn 20 percent more than those of less selective universities—every year for the rest of their working lives. These advantages swamp any differences in tuition and other expenses, which in any case are often lower than those of less selective schools because of more generous need-based financial aid. The Ivy admissions sweepstakes may be irrational, but the parents and teenagers who clamber to win it are not.

JFK Assassination

Dennis Prager was 15 years old when JFK was shot on Nov. 22, 1963. Fifty years later, Dennis said: “I was in tenth grade. My principal announced it on the loudspeaker at my school and I was certain that the president would live… And then I got on a bus to go home and a stranger said the president was dead.

“That weekend was a somber weekend in the Prager household… That was the only Friday night that my parents watched television. That’s how overwhelming it was for us.”

“I was walking by the subway that Sunday and I remember seeing a train coming into the Kings Highway station and the thought going through my mind was, ‘What? The trains are running? You’re going back to normal? Things have changed.'”

“The meaning is that this nothing could alter history.”

Summer Camp

Prager spent the summer of 1965 as a waiter and assistant counselor at Camp Massad in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. “This camp provided the most positive Jewish experiences in my life. In addition, it was a Hebrew-speaking camp, and I became fluent in Hebrew. This began a lifelong love of languages.” Dennis had his “first serious romance. Life was getting better.” (Prager’s CD)

Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on Leviticus 18: “In the religious camp in which I was a counselor, the boys were taught they were murdering if they masturbated. They didn’t stop masturbating. They entered a world where they thought they were murderers.”

In a 1994 lecture on Gen. 38, Dennis said:

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 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. 

Sept. 17, 2009, Dennis said: “When I was a camper, about ten years old, there was a boy (Robert) in my bunk who had a problem urinating while sleeping. And instead of gaining any sympathy, four kids one night, I was the bystander, they went over and put sheets over their heads like ghosts to wake him to induce him to urinate. And then thinking it was a great victory… I’ve been atoning for that my whole life. Part of the reason I fight evil is for what I did not do that one night.”

“The first day of camp [when Dennis was a counselor], the public address system at 7 am would play. These are 12, 13 year old boys. The first day of camp, nothing happened. There was no stirring. They just stayed asleep.

“I then said, ‘OK boys’, in the sweetest way possible, ‘It’s time to get up.’ What I then got…was not exactly screw-you, but in that framework. ‘He’s going to get me up? Who’s he kidding?’

“I’d say, ‘Boys, I want you to be out of your beds in a minute.’

“They’d snicker.

“I’d go to the boy who’s bed was next to mine and say, ‘Barry, I’ll give you five seconds to get out of bed or you will be under it.’

“Nothing happens. I count to five and I very sweetly turn the cot over on top of him so Barry is now on the floor and the bed is on Barry. A real 180 turn on poor Barry.

“I went to the next guy. I said, ‘I’ll give you five seconds or you will be under your bed.’

“He didn’t quite believe me. Five seconds later, he is under his bed.

“Third guy, I give you five seconds, and amazingly, he got out of bed.

“The next day, the same thing. I walk over to Barry and give him five seconds and he gets out of bed.

“By the third day, I lay in bed and said, ‘Everybody up.’ And everybody got out of bed.

“I was known for having the easiest time getting my kids up than any other counselor from camp.”

“I wonder if I would be prosecuted today for flipping a kid over in his bed. The notion that all physical interaction with kids in your charge is one of the many foolish notions that developed in the last generation.”

Said Dennis July 6, 2010: “I gave full permission to the counselors of my kids to give my kids a well earned smack. There was no counselor in the history of my kids’ camping who abused my kids with smacks.

“I used to give Richie a noogie if the clouds did not cover the sun in time for a photo I wanted to take… I’d go, Richie, you’ve got ten seconds to get a cloud.

“For those of you who know photography, you never take a photo in bare sunlight.

“A noogie is with your knuckle a good one into the shoulder.

“Richie thought it was hilarious. He was making all these incantations to make the clouds move. This is how guys horse around until the 1960s decided to make guys into girls.”

One summer evening, Dennis got into a bad car accident. He and his girlfriend were hospitalized for a day or two, and Max Prager — the owner of the demolished car with the possibly faulty brakes — was sued by the girl’s father.

Max Prager wrote in chapter 27:

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.

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.”

Thanksgiving

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.

Nov. 28, 2013, Dennis said: “Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in many ways. There is no American by group or by individual — and this is a favorite theme of mine — who should not be able to have a Thanksgiving.”

Summing up the post-WWII attitude to nationalism, John Derbyshire wrote: “To cherish one’s country was acceptable, but to regard it as the organic expression of a particular people was frowned upon.”

American Jews most observant of Torah don’t observe Thanksgiving because their religion commands that one not follow non-Jewish customs (Leviticus 18:3). “Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner argues that it is obvious and apparent that–whatever the merit of celebrating Thanksgiving the first time in the 1600s–the establishment of an annual holiday that is based on the Christian calendar is, at the very least, closely associated with idol worship and thus prohibited.”

John from Queens, New York, called Nov. 28, 2013: “I grew up in a pretty Orthodox Jewish family and we never celebrated Thanksgiving and neither did anyone in my community because it was considered a non-Jewish holiday and if anyone did celebrate Thanksgiving, that was frowned upon.”
Dennis: “Is that still the case?”

John: “Yes… I remember bringing up to a member of my community several years ago that there was a certain rabbi, Joseph Solveitchik, who used to eat a turkey on Thanksgiving, and they scoffed at me and laughed me off, and said, ‘Huh, he’s not a legitimate rabbi.'”

Dennis: “He was the leading halakhist of his generation along with Moses Feinstein.”

John: “For the more modern.”

Dennis: “Yeah, well, he was the rabbi of the Yeshiva University. So they discounted him? Do they discount Chabad, because they are fervent observers of Thanksgiving? I think it is the insularity of New York. I don’t think that was true of Orthodox Jews in Nashville.”

Dennis is wrong. Most Orthodox Jews in America don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Joseph Solveitchik wasn’t a halakhist. He made few rulings on Jewish law.

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 millennia. Hanukkah in 2013 was only “early” if you consider the Western calendar the ultimate real. For one rooted in Torah, the Hebrew calendar is reality and the Western calendar is just another custom of the Gentiles like hunting, Christmas, and saying, “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.”

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 baby boomers taught to be untrue — don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Keeping Kosher

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin wrote on page 35 of his book A Code Of Jewish Ethics:

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.”

Professor Marc B. Shapiro wrote April 13, 2010:

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.

Dennis Prager wrote: “I left keeping kosher after yeshiva precisely because no reasons were given. I returned to kashrut after reading an article on the ethics of the Jewish dietary laws written by an observant non-Orthodox rabbi, Prof. Jacob Milgrom of Berkeley, in a non-Jewish philosophical journal.(Ultimate Issues, Summer, 1985, pg. 10)

Dennis loves the taste of bacon and shrimp but hasn’t eaten them since his 20s. (Aug. 3, 2012)

In his third lecture on Deuteronomy in 2002, Dennis Prager said:

“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?”

In his circa 2006 lecture on Deut. 27, Dennis said:

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.

In his fourth lecture on the Chatam Sofer, historian Marc B. Shapiro said:

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 first [Commentary magazine] 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.

Jews & Blacks

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…

Max wrote in chapter 29: “She really was the surrogate mother to Dennis for many years. Since he was a problem child in school and a doll at home, he conveyed his most private feelings to her.”

Like many American Jews, Dennis Prager has warm feelings about blacks. He practices affirmative action on his radio show, bending over backwards to be particularly kind to his black callers. On Jan. 19, 1998, Dennis said that if he had to choose between two equally qualified potential employees, he’d probably choose the black. A caller reminded Dennis of his stand that race doesn’t matter. Dennis replied that he didn’t live in theory.

Jul. 12, 2013, Dennis said: “There’s an affirmative action program on this program for black conservatives.” 

Apr. 7, 2014, Dennis said: “There are times when a person’s views are so horrific, it is hard to understand how a company could continue to employ someone. If a guy is in the Ku Klux Klan, if a guy is in a white supremacist fascistic group, I understand it. If you deny the Holocaust and you deny it publicly. There are a few [beliefs a person can hold that make him worthy of being fired] because you’re talking about freaks. Freaks are in the KKK.”

According to Dennis in 2014, “Corruption is Africa’s greatest problem. The word corruption does not arouse the moral revulsion that it should. We think of it as more a nuisance than a great evil. But corruption kills societies every bit as much as murder kills an individual. Moreover there is no hope for any society in which corruption is endemic.”

Dennis said Mar. 17, 2014: “Tribalism is racism. Tribalism is a curse for modernity… You cannot build a successful nation state if tribalism is strong.”

Political scientist Robert Weissberg gave a talk in 2000 on “The Relationship Between Blacks and Jews“:

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.

Unions

Oct. 12, 2010, Dennis said: “I was in eighth grade. I did not follow the news very much, but I lived in New York, which had nine newspapers. I think I could name them. That’s how excited I was to see them on the newsstand every day.

“The printers union struck against the newspapers. It dragged on so long that it was clear that many newspapers would not survive the strike if it dragged on. What were they striking against? Not wages. They were striking against bringing in more automated machinery to make it cheaper to produce a newspaper so the papers could survive. The unions decided it was better to lose jobs and to lose newspapers than to lose the strike. So they lost six newspapers, including the New York Herald-Tribune, one of the world’s greatest newspapers.

“And it was known that would happen. I remember James Reston, the most prominent New York Times reporter, went on the radio and said please stop the strike. The Times will survive but the Tribune won’t.

“Under selfish, there’s a picture of union bosses.”

Pets

Dec. 27, 2010, Dennis said:

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.

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.

Social Capital

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.”

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.”

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.

According to Dennis, “Racism — the belief that people of a certain skin color are inherently different (and inferior or superior) — is not only evil; it is moronic. Racism is in equal amounts stupid and vile.”

Apr. 11, 2014, Dennis said: “There is more racism proportionately in the black community than among whites. To deny that is to deny that the sun rises in the east. Just look at the opposition to a black and a white marrying, how intense that is. You are considered a traitor to the race. If a white thinks you are a traitor to your race for marrying a black, you’re considered a white supremacist.”

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.”

Scholar 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.”

Close-knit community is in inverse proportion to racial diversity noted 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 had the most neighborliness.

Steve Sailer (highly regarded by psychometricians) asked in 2007: “Can you guess which two cities lead the list of top 50 metropolitan areas in terms of the highest percentage of adults volunteering for charity? And which two cities came in last?” Lilly-white cities Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City came in first, while diverse cities Miami and Las Vegas came in last.

A resident of Chicago for more than a decade, Steve Sailer worked with his community to do good, but concluded:

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.

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

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.

Nuclear War

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.”

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.”

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.”

“I went to bed at night with a transistor radio under my pillow and listened to Jean Shepherd. He never took calls. Just talked for three hours.” (Dec. 21, 2010)

“I began calling talk radio in mid-high school. Was I nervous! I remember when the guy would say, ‘Dennis in Brooklyn.’ I was dripping with perspiration.” (Dec. 17, 2010)

Dec. 17, 2013, Dennis said: “Transistor radios. They were all made in Japan… I would go to bed at night and take my transistor radio and put it under my pillow. Until high school, I had a bed-time. It was so strictly enforced. I had to be in pajamas and brush my teeth by that time. I think it is a good idea. I don’t think I had one for my kids quite as much.

“Is that why I stay up late now? That might be the case. I think of it as liberty.”

Passover

Dennis wrote Dec. 21, 2004: “I received the biggest gifts of my childhood on Passover. My grandfather gave me expensive gifts (like a portable typewriter [and a short-wave radio said Dennis 12/20/11]) for “stealing the afikoman,” a ritual of sheer bribery devised by the rabbis many centuries ago to keep children awake as long as possible through the lengthy Passover Seder. Believe me, I thought a lot more about what I would get if I stole Papa’s “afikoman,” the matzo set aside for dessert, than I did about God liberating the Jewish slaves. But the “commercialism” of the Seder eventually worked, and I came to love Passover and believe that God took the Jews out of Egypt.”

In a 2009 lecture on Leviticus 25, Dennis said: “The Torah says you have to take care of people you don’t like. It is easy to be nice to friends. It’s your crappy sibling or or kid or parent or nephew. That’s the hard one to be nice to. People never have a hard time getting together with friends for dinner. It is on holidays when the family comes together that there is tension.”

“I remember Passover seders when extended family came to our home. It was a conglomeration of humans who would never be together if you threw darts at a phone book. People who were Orthodox. People who thought religion was idiocy.

“I had one uncle, may he rest in peace, as soon as he walked in, he would just start asking my mother when food would be served, which always cracked me up as a kid because my parents were Orthodox, there was a long ritual before dinner on Passover. Two hours at least. And about every twenty minutes, ‘Hilda, when’s the food coming out?’

“I loved it. It was the highlight of my seder. But he was family. So he had to be there.

“It’s an interesting point — treat your relative like he’s a stranger.”

Nov. 24, 2010, Dennis said: “My mother would say before Passover — ‘Only the men got out of Egypt.’ It was the wittiest line she came out with. My mother had many great traits, witty was not one of them.”

In a speech to Christians United For Israel in April 2010, Dennis said: “There is a phrase in the Passover Haggadah — in every generation, somebody arises to annihilate us. I remember as a child thinking that the rabbis of 2,000 years ago got it wrong. After the Holocaust, we’re not going to have anybody else try to annihilate us. The world has learned how terrible that is.”

The Rich

In a May 14, 2012 speech, Dennis said: “To this day, I don’t remember my next door neighbor’s first name because when I grew up, you knew adults by ‘Mr.’ I still know him as Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein had a Cadillac. I remember staring at that thing. I remember which one — the one with the rocket tail-lights. It was so long that you would take a walk just to get across it… We had an Oldsmobile. We were two levels below Mr. Klein because in between was a Buick. You were ranked accordingly. It was Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Chevrolet. Everybody knew your income by which GM car you drove… Mr. Lupkin, a friend of my parents, had a Buick. I thought he was very wealthy. Until I went to college and learned about social inequality, it never occurred to me to resent the fact that they were much richer than me. I just thought that Mr. Klein has a better-paying job and he deserves it.”

Said Dennis June 28, 2010: “I remember only one emotion towards my neighbor [Mr. Klein] — I hope that one day I can own a Cadillac.”

May 18, 2012, Dennis said: “I grew up thinking we were rich. Boy, were we not. If we could afford an Oldsmobile, it was a big deal. When I went back to visit the house I grew up in, I thought, it’s so narrow. There’s no back yard.”

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.”

On May 17, 2012, Dennis said he did not major in Music at college out of fear it would destroy his love of music.

Why would the study of a subject destroy his love for it? Because it would remove illusions. Dennis loves his illusions and he hates academia for destroying what he loves.

Sensitivity

“The ability to read how others react to you is about as important a subject as there is in life,” Dennis said Dec. 11, 2009. “I think I am very aware of this. I think it was something I was aware of at an early age. I was always very sensitive to whether or not I was boring anybody. One of the reasons I was able to become an interesting speaker was that I was very aware even in private conversations in high school, whether or not I was boring the person I was with, I would see their face, whether they had stopped concentrating.”

Empathy requires abstract thought. The measure of one’s ability to conduct abstract thought is measured by IQ. Not all high IQ people engage in  deep empathy, but the capacity to empathize correlates with IQ. According to this 2019 study “Why are smarter individuals more prosocial? A study on the mediating roles of empathy and moral identity”: “Highly intelligent children are more likely to develop higher levels of empathic skills because they are more sensitive to other people’s emotional cues, and are better able to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

Jan. 14, 2010, Dennis said: “When I am with boys and I love being with boys, I do, I always have, I have an affinity, even an emotional affinity, little girls are cute but I must admit that if I could spend a weekend with ten-year-old girls or ten-year-old boys, I’d opt for the ten-year-old-boys because I feel like I have more to say to them… When I meet boys, I am extremely aware that I want to come off to them as an adult and not like a boy. We did this many years ago — do you high-five a kid? And a lot of you who are wonderful parents and wonderful people say it’s not a problem. And if the kid raises his hand for a high-five, I gave in on that, but I never initiate a high-five. I shake kids’ hands, certainly when I meet them, I shake them, ‘How do you do?’ If they ever say Mr. Prager, I never say, ‘Call me Dennis.’ Never! If they call me ‘Dennis’, I never say ‘Call me Mr. Prager’. I allow either way. I don’t say to anybody except a peer. I don’t insist on Mr. Prager at all, but if people call me ‘Mr. Prager’, I never correct them.

“It is something we have lost in society. Every friend of my parents was Mr. and Mrs. When I finally called them by their first names in my mid-twenties, I can’t tell you how awkward it felt… Even 20 years later, I wasn’t fully comfortable. Of course I did because it would’ve seen ridiculously removed from them and I was very close to some of the friends of my parents. And seeing these males was good for me.”

The Road Less Traveled

Max Prager wrote in chapter 32:

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)

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.”

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.

Brooklyn College

After high school, Dennis attended Brooklyn College. He graduated 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.”

Dennis said in his January 2002 autobiography lecture: “One day a guy named Mark Rudd, who was the head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was at Columbia where he led all those terrible demonstrations, he came to Brooklyn College to do the same thing. Students at Brooklyn College pelted him with tomatoes and eggs when he tried to organize students against the government and the war. We were a working class college. They were an elite college. I realized that a lot of this stuff against the country from the left came from kids from Scarsdale and kids from much wealthier homes.”

Apr. 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.”

July 16, 2012, Dennis said that none of his college teachers were instrumental in him achieving professional success.

Dennis was not thrilled to get the right to vote at age 18. “I thought 18 was too young and I was 18 at the time. I said to my girlfriend [second serious one, said DP 9/13/11], ‘Anna, why are they giving me the vote? I don’t know anything.’ I knew that I knew more than most kids but I still didn’t think that I knew anything to make an intelligent vote. But I was raised in a religious world, which almost inherently gives you some insight into how little you know because of how much they knew in the past.” (May 11, 2010)

“I didn’t bother to attend my college graduation,” said Dennis on Sept. 4, 2009. 

June 24, 2010, Dennis said: “When I wrote my finals in college, in the middle of my long essay, I’d write, ‘And the Yankees won 6-2.’ I was born with a chutzpah gene. They never caught. Not one of my college teachers read my entire essay. That’s the proof. The guy would’ve flunked me for having the audacity to write that in the middle of an essay on the papacy’s decline in the 12th Century.”

Mar. 22, 2010, Dennis said: “When I knew that I had to get my own health insurance at age 21, I did. I had the non-left-wing view that it is good to be an adult.”

Dennis wrote Jan. 19, 2010:

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.

I recall Dennis Prager saying on the radio that in Holland during college, he took advantage of some of the freedoms offered there (a prostitute, not drugs).

Jan. 17, 2014, Dennis said: “If they have marijuana for health, why not prostitution for health?”

On June 7, 2013, Dennis said: “I went to Syria in my mid-20s, but I didn’t announce. When they asked religion, on one of the Arab countries visa application, and I wrote, ‘Orthodox.’ While I wasn’t an Orthodox Jew…

“This was a life-changing moment. I was on a bus from Beirut to Damascus. I was seated next to a man, the first Iraqi I had ever met. I talk to everybody. I love talking to strangers. This is why I didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea to invade Iraq.

“I said, ‘Sir, could you summarize the Iraqi people in a sentence?’ He said, ‘No problem. Iraqis are the most barbaric people in the world.’ You can imagine how I felt. That was chilling. But it got worse.

“He then said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said ‘Dennis.’ He said, ‘What’s your last name?’ I said, ‘Prager.’ And he said, ‘What are the origins of your last name?’ I knew what he was getting at. I said, ‘It’s a German word, which means from Prague. I assume I have German and Czech ancestors.’ He said, ‘Maybe so, but I think Prager is a Jewish name.’ There are many Pragers who are Jewish and many who aren’t, but he was obsessed with finding out if I was a Jew.”

Trip To Israel, Europe

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 January 9, 2023 Youtube show with Julie Hartman, Dennis said: “So one summer [during college], I said to a friend or two, ‘How you would like to go with me to Europe this summer? I’m going to Bulgaria.’ They thought I was out of my mind. I did it so often I can tell you how it works — Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, that’s going south to north. Another summer I’d go north to south. I’m sorry to say this because the people were suffering but I had an amazing time. They loved Americans and the women from Eastern Europe loved Americans too. I won’t go further.”

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.

Mar. 21, 2014, Dennis said: “I was changed the first time I visited India. I was in my 20s. I was not changed by seeing abject poverty. The biggest impact was seeing how many happy children there were in India. I thought poverty was co-extensive with great unhappiness.

“I remember going to outside Calcutta and kids were naked and they were just running around, laughing themselves silly, kicking balls and playing. It shook me up. I remember thinking that we have so many kids in our country who don’t have the innocence and kids can’t be happy if they’re not innocent. Children depend upon innocence because it gives them security.”

“What makes people happy are attitudes and cultures. There are certain cultures that don’t produce happy people and there are others that produce a lot of happy people.”

“India has huge problems, not least of which is the class system. I remember the kids came begging seeing Westerners and if you didn’t give them anything, they’d just wave bye bye, while in other cultures, they got very angry.”

The most consistent phone call Dennis received in his 40 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 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.'”

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 Nov. 30, 2010: “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)

Dennis never finished reading the short book. 

“I was enthralled by [the 19th Century Jewish philosopher] Hermann Cohen in college because he combined reason and Judaism.” (2003 lecture on Deut. 10)

Leeds

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

Sept. 26, 2002, Dennis said: “I had a choice in high school between learning Spanish and French. I chose French because it was harder. And it ended up saving my life [in Morocco].”

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…

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.

Dennis wrote: “During the first week of September, 1968, I set sail from New York to Harwich, England. If the day I won the Junior Year Abroad Award had been the happiest day, this week on board this student ship was the happiest week of my life. Free, independent, living on my own, far from home!” (CD)

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 [from Kiehl]. 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 round up?

Dennis regularly took a boat from Harwich, England, to Bremerhaven, Germany, to see his girlfriend. 

In his “Jewish Intellectual Biography” lecture, Dennis was asked if getting a German girlfriend was like trying ham. “I have so many answers. It was a lot easier.”

Questioner: “More delicious.”

Dennis: “I was torn. Yeshiva boy. With blonde Aryan Brigitta. I was a junior in college. I called her into my cabin one morning to see me put on tefillin. It was less dramatic than I thought because she had never seen it before. I wanted her to know that I was no different than the Jews who were butchered by the Nazis. I may look All-American, I may talk All-American, but I am no different than those German Jews that the Nazis would cut their beards off and kill them. She didn’t care. I thought it might shake her. I did it for me. Even though I wasn’t putting on tefillin every day but I did for her.”

“I went to a camera store in Hamburg in 1969. We got to talking and somehow, I mentioned I had just been in Israel. The guy asked me, ‘Are you a Jew?’ I said yes. He said, ‘I want to give you this Leica M4 at cost. It is my little way of saying we’re sorry.’ Maybe this is why Brigitta was sent into my life so that I would visit Germany a lot.”

Said Dennis in a 1996 lecture on Exodus 20: “I was 21 years old. It was 1969. I had an atheist British roommate at the University of Leeds. The guy lived with his girlfriend all year. I had this huge flat to myself. One day the guy shows up to do his laundry. It’s a Saturday afternoon. I’m lying in bed resting and reading. He comes in, ‘Hey, Dennis, how are you? Are you sick?’ I go no. ‘Then why are you lying in bed in the afternoon?’

“The guy was in Physics. I said, well, it’s my Sabbath. ‘Do you believe in religion?’ Yep. ‘Do you believe in God?’ Yep. ‘What is God?’ Knowing his field, I said, ‘God is the only absolute in a universe of relativity.’”

On Sep. 23, 2011, Dennis said: “From when I was in my early twenties and really began thinking about these issues, I did flirt with becoming irreligious but my alternative was never to go to another religion but hedonism.”

Prager studied international history, comparative religion and Arabic at the University of Leeds. The climate aggravated his asthma. “I remember one day the professor announced, ‘The sun is shining. Class dismissed’.” (Feb. 4, 2010)

“England was going through a social upheaval as represented by the micro-skirt, which made studying difficult.” (Jan. 2002 lecture on ideological autobiography)

“I remember living in England for a year stunned at the material conditions of the middle class in Britain, incomparably lower than in the United States.” (Oct. 6, 2010)

“I booed a piece at Royal Albert Hall in England when I was a student. I used to go down to London for concerts. Some modern composer had a vocal piece which was disgusting. It was like Jackson Pollock in song. I booed when the composer came out and everyone turned around and looked at me. How do we register what we thought of the piece? I didn’t want him shot. I just wanted to tell him I thought it was crap.” (Nov. 15, 2013)

Circa 2002, Dennis gave a lecture titled, “A Life of Travel.” He said: “I have had culture shock on only a few occasions. The first time I ever went abroad at age 20 (aside from Canada), I went to Belgium and all the signs were in Flemish. French would have been OK because I learned it in high school. I went with a friend. He had relatives in Antwerp. I remember seeing all the signs in a foreign language and I got antsy. It was over in a couple of days. The next time I experienced it was when I went to Morocco. That was very difficult.”

“The moment I got off the boat in Algiers,” Dennis said, “there are few places on earth that are as different as Europe and North Africa… It’s an Arab country, a Muslim country, but that didn’t get me. Tangiers is a particularly rough city. The moment I was off the boat, I was constantly descended upon by people offering me men, women, sheep. Watches. I felt terrible. I was alone and I felt like everybody was trying to get me… I spent two weeks [in Morocco] alone, but it was hard in Algiers that I sat on my bed and cried that I was in Tangiers alone and why didn’t I go with my German girlfriend to Scandinavia.”

During Christmas vacation 1968, Dennis traveled through Spain, then Morocco, where he said he encountered anti-Semitism for the first time in his life. In Marrakech, he saw four Moroccan thugs on motorbikes beat Jews leaving a Jewish home after the Sabbath. Prager intervened, kicking the leader of the thugs so hard they he lifted off the ground. As they gathered to attack him, calling him a Zionist Prager yelled in French that he was an American, a friend of King Hassan, and that the thugs would be hanged if they hurt him. It worked. (6/7/13 & CD)

In a 1994 lecture on Gen. 34, Dennis said: “When I was in Morocco in 1968, four American women bumped into me and said, ‘Could you please pose as our husband?’ I thought they were joking but they just wanted a man to whom they belonged to travel with them. With great great deep deep difficulty, I acceded to their request only because I am so chivalrous.”

Said Dennis Dec. 15, 2010: “I’ll never forget when I was smoking my pipe in Morocco during Ramadan, I was in my early 20s, and a man came over to me very respectfully and said you will have to stop smoking. You can’t smoke during Ramadan. It seemed obvious that I wasn’t Muslim.”

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)