A Biography of Dennis Prager by Luke Ford (Part 5)

Moving To Los Angeles In 1976

On July 10, 2009, Dennis said: “I was a kid in my twenties. I’d never been to Los Angeles. I remember I came out to give a talk. I remember standing at the American Airlines terminal at JFK [airport in New York] and I saw the flight number and then I saw ‘Los Angeles.’ I don’t think there were five times in my life when I was as excited as I was to get a on a plane to go to Los Angeles. It’s one of those times when you can cry.”

Said Dennis in January 2002: “I remember the first time I was brought to L.A., I was 24 years old, to give a lecture. I remember it so vividly. I rented a car and I was driving down palm-tree lined Wilshire Blvd and saying to myself, ‘Dennis, if you are not the luckiest man in the world, I wonder who is? 

“By this time I knew I was going to leave New York. I knew I was going to leave New York the day I was in another city.”

July 30, 2010, Dennis said: “When I have read or been told about any of the Leo characteristics, it has struck me that I fit pretty well. The people I know, fit pretty well.”

“When I moved out to LA from New York [his last address was in Whitestone, Queens], it was the first time in my life that someone said, ‘What’s your sign?’ I had no idea what they were talking about.”

In April, 1976, Shlomo Bardin, the 76-year old founder and director of the Brandeis Institute, invited the 26-year old Prager to take charge. “He announced I’d be his successor and died that week.”

Said Dennis in January 2002: “I was the youngest speaker to ever come to the Brandeis Institute to lecture. They brought me out five more times.”

“I was in Mississippi giving a lecture and I got a call [relaying that Shlomo Bardin had died]. ‘Come on out. You’re going to speak at the funeral.’

“I cried like a baby. I could not give the eulogy without constantly crying. And I was crying for me as much as for him. I wasn’t ready for such responsibility. The only job I had held before this was as a waiter at summer camp.

“I came out to LA with a cot, a piano, an accordion and a few thousand books. I lived at the institute. I lived in Simi Valley for three years at this 3,200 acre retreat. When I was dating, it was very powerful. ‘Would you like to see my place?’ It was 3,200 acres. That was better than partying to make an impact.”

Rabbi Telushkin served as Education Director.

Max Prager wrote: “Dennis also engaged our nephew, Elliot Prager, as Social Director.”

In 1976, Prager was interviewed on television for the first time. He was asked by KNBC about what he was trying to achieve at Brandeis-Bardin.

“We’re trying to turn out leaders,” Prager said.

“Why?”

“Because a society without leaders is a leaderless society.” (Jan. 24, 2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A woman wrote to me from Wyoming. She has two kids and a husband and she smokes marijuana every night. I’ve spoked a cigar and a pipe since high school. I’ve smoked in front of my children since birth. They’re very healthy. They don’t appear to be dying from second-hand smoke. Would you smoke your marijuana in front of your children like I smoke my cigar? She didn’t respond.”

“My father had his Scotch on the rocks every night but I would’ve been a different person if he had smoked a joint every night.”

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

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

In a column Dec. 6, 2005, Dennis wrote: “After the first two summers [at Brandeis-Bardin], I began to play a game with myself. On the first night of the session, I made a mental note of which women I thought the most attractive and compared that list to one I made after the four weeks. The names on the latter list were rarely on the first-night list.”

On June 22, 2010, Dennis said: “We had a one-month session…to teach kids Judaism. I inherited from the man who founded it and he had a rule for that one month — you could not pair off. Same-sex friendships of course. But he did not want romance for the one-month they were there and I supported that completely. And I was very strict on the rule. It was opposite sex only. It was to prevent a breakdown of the system into who loves who and who’s breaking up with who.”

In a lecture on Lev. 18 in 2008, Dennis said: “I had a boy [at Brandeis-Bardin] and he attended the month-course in the summer for boys and girls 19-25. They lived there. He came over one day. He was bereft because he was attracted to men and didn’t want to be. He wanted to follow the Torah and he wanted to love a woman. You have a choice in how you act but you don’t have a choice in what you gravitate to. I have deep sympathy for the homosexual who wants to take the Bible seriously.”

On June 8, 2010, Dennis said: “I was single. When I taught Judaism, I taught that the ideal was to marry. I remember saying over and over — I have not met Judaism’s ideal. I don’t think I should be fired because I haven’t, but I should be fired if I deny that the ideal is to marry.” 

“I can testify that groupies don’t hang out with Torah teachers,” said Dennis in his 17th lecture on Deuteronomy (2005). “This is the price I’ve paid since an early age — the wrong profession… It was never a great pickup line in my single days. So what do you do? I lecture on ethical monotheism. Oooh, I’m in room 207.”

In a lecture on Deut. 22:12, Dennis said: “Virginity is a big deal in most societies. Virginity not mattering is new in human history and isolated to the Western world. I am not a great virginity valuer. It was not one of the things I put in my singles ads — ‘Only virgins respond please!’ I am a modern.”

“Broken hymen-induced blood on a sheet is not my favorite form of aesthetic stimulation.”

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

I was at a speech and a woman came over to me and she said, ‘Dennis, I read your books and I got involved in Judaism and let me show you the product of my involvement. I am working on this whole syllabus on how children can obey their parents.’ It was frightening. I thought to myself, I wish I never wrote that book.

It’s funny when people get influenced by you and then they do things you would never in a thousand years want them to do. That’s why I’m not starting a new movement. You can’t control those who you think you’ve influenced.

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

Dennis was a confident teacher who removed anyone below him who got in his way. When he walked into a room, people took notice.

Unhappy with authority, Prager chafed under the BBI board. Many on the board returned his hostility.

In his speeches since working at BBI, Prager mocks his old board. He tells one story of wanting to do singles weekends. Prager says the board was shocked. What would we talk about? Prager said that knowing how the board thought, he told them he’d take a week or two to study the matter. Then Prager returned to the board and said they’d done a study and found that the brains of single people were very similar to the brains of married people. Therefore, Prager proposed a similar curricula – the study of Judaism. 

BBI hosted college students who would often put on skits. Shortly before taking charge, Prager witnessed one skit that was deliberately filled with the sounds of flatulence. Prager decided that once he took charge, all student skits would have to be cleared before performance to make sure they upheld Jewish norms.

“[H]aving been a camp counselor and camp director for ten years,” Prager wrote on page four of his 1995 book Think a Second Time, “I know that few things come more naturally to many children than meanness, petty cruelty, bullying, and a lack of empathy for less fortunate peers. Visit any bunk of thirteen-year-olds in which one camper is particularly fat, short, clumsy, or emotionally or intellectually disadvantaged, and you are likely to observe cruelty that would shock an adult.”

In a lecture on Lev. 19:12-16 in 2008, Dennis said: “When I paid lecturers [at Brandeis-Bardin], I brought dozens and dozens of lecturers, I paid them before they spoke. They came for the weekend and I paid them Friday afternoon. And I saw their faces. It seemed so classy on my part, on the institute’s part, to do that. I inherited that from the predecessor.”

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

In September of 1983, Prager abruptly left the Brandeis Bardin Institute. He wrote: “While the membership and I loved each other, the heads of the board of directors and I did not. Indeed, I left BBI largely because the president/chairman of the board [William Chotiner] made life miserable for me. I occasionally reflect on where my life would be today had he and others of the lay leadership treated me differently.” (Prager CD)

Dec. 3, 2010, Dennis said: “There were very serious problems with the board of directors. A friend of mine [Joseph Telushkin?] came in to my office at this institute and he walked in as I was looking at my stamp collection. I haven’t seen the collection in about 20 years. He told one of our mutual friends, ‘Do I envy Dennis! You should have seen how distracted that stamp collection made him. He was able to leave his problems and concentrate on the stamps.”

Joseph Telushkin wrote on page 104 of his book Jewish Humor about Prager and Brandeis-Bardin:

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

Max wrote about Dennis: “Several years ago [1983?], while still being a Democrat, he was asked to enter the Congressional primary against the incumbent. I, not caring for the sleaze of many politicians, tried to talk my son out of running. When he asked me to give him $1,000 for the application fee and to prepare a financial statement, I did so reluctantly. After a month or two, he had a change of heart and the fee went down the drain.”

While Prager claimed he quit, a Jewish Journal March 14, 1986 cover story said he was pushed out. Many on the board said Prager was a lousy administrator.

Sheldon Teitelbaum wrote:

At the time of Bardin’s death, [Prager] was 27 years old. According to Dr. Victor Goodhill, a former institute vice-president, “He was almost a small, younger Shlomo.”

Prager, now a talk show host for KABC radio, says that Bardin had actually asked him to succeed him as director of Brandeis-Bardin, mainly, he says, “because I articulated the values he himself held — that the Jewish role in the world is to repair it under God’s rule.” [Michael] Harris [Bardin’s assistant from 1961-71], however, argues that, “Dennis was simply there at a time when Shlomo was most vulnerable. He saw the end coming and he needed to pitch somebody.” Prager’s association with the institute was only a few years old and his appointment was not to everyone’s liking. Indeed, says Goodhill, “There were people on the board of directors who were violently opposed.”

The sources of this opposition are numerous and complex. Goodhill maintains that Prager was too young to successfully move into the slot vacated by a man considerably his senior. As Prager himself observed, “Some of the people on the board had children who were older than me.”

But it was not simply Prager’s youth inspired controversy. Nor was it Prager’s personal style, alternately charming and abrasive, inspired and, some say, demagogic. Rather, implies [William] Chotiner [Brandeis-Bardin’s first president], perhaps Prager’s most vociferous critic, the issue was nothing less than a fight for the soul and future of Brandeis-Bardin.

Chotiner’s case against Prager was based upon his conviction that the type of Judaism Prager advocated was too rigid. If allowed to impose his values upon Brandeis-Bardin, Prager would ultimately betray Shlomo Bardin’s vision of the institute as a place for all Jews to enjoy. In a sense, Prager concurs with this assessment, though he insists that Chotiner was motivated by great personal animosity toward him.

Dennis Prager served as institute director for seven years, despite the existence of a virtual split within the executive board as to his efficacy. During this time, claim both Prager and his adherents, he quadrupled the BBI membership. “I had the largest BBIs in history,” argues Prager, “which raised more money in membership fees than ever before. I was a superb administrator, and under my own administrator, Bob Bleiweiss, the place ran like clockwork.”

Even Prager’s opponents credit him with some accomplishments, specifically the singles program which he initiated. But he had no staying power, they say. “Under Dennis’s directorship,” says Chotiner, “Brandeis was a swinging door. We were picking 200 members one year and losing 150 the next.” Chotiner is not alone in his contention that Prager lacked intellectual depth. His critics argue that he was basically a “three-speech man,” and the membership grew tired of hearing the same speeches time after time. Others grew weary of what they claim were repeated bouts of vindictive, almost paranoid behavior by Prager. But there are also those among Prager’s detractors who did not share this view. Says Dr. Goodhill, “Dennis was a brilliant man. He was also very courageous — there was never anything bashful about him. I think that’s what bothered the older people on the board was the strong and rather major dominance at the institute that Dennis wanted and did exercise. We accepted that in Shlomo because it took that kind of personality to get things going. And Dennis did have to be a one-man show!”

Unfortunately for the institute, strife and dissension within the board over Prager’s leadership resulted in a brief but traumatic conflict, between 1979 and 1981, over the actual decision-making process at Brandeis-Bardin, which some called “elitist” and “undemocratic.”

For decades (until he started writing a biweekly column for it in 2009), Prager despised the Jewish Journal, and regularly gave vent to his feelings on this matter publicly, usually expressed in political terms. For example, he said “it is the most left-wing Jewish newspaper in the country.”

David Margolis wrote in the Jewish Journal in December 1992:

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

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

…The seven years of Prager’s tenure in Simi Valley, however, were filled with conflict between himself and the Brandeis board, whom he accuses of treating him “miserably.” At Brandeis, Prager says now, not without bitterness, “I learned that many Jews are uncomfortable with paying another Jew to do something Jewish.”

Or was the problem, as some board members complain, that he tried to make BBI into an Orthodox institution? Prager acknowledges trying to push individuals toward greater observance, in a marked change from Bardin’s non-religious orientation that was sure to threaten and antagonize many. But he castigates the view, which he ascribes to much of the non-Orthodox community, that keeping kosher and not working on Shabbat define someone as Orthodox.

Even his critics acknowledge that Prager succeeded in exciting many young people about Jewish observance and bringing them into the Jewish community. But that enterprise had its down side as well. He developed “followers,” explains one BBI insider during those years, but he turned off many people by leaving no room for “intelligent disagreement. His bullying antagonized a lot of people.”

It is a complaint about Prager’s style that clings to him even today.

When Dennis left Brandeis-Bardin, Joseph Telushkin left not only the institute but also the state.

Dennis: “Through our mid-thirties, we were inseparable. We were together almost every day when he lived in California. I remember him saying that he got used to the fact that I didn’t always call back. I’m not a big fan of the phone.” (Mar. 24, 2012)

I don’t believe Dennis was ever invited back to BBI. 

In a 1995 lecture on Gen. 42: 7, Dennis explains why Joseph was harsh with his brothers who sold him into slavery: “I still think it is partially revenge. I would do it. If I had been sold into slavery and just spent twelve years in a dungeon, I would not go, ‘Hey, it’s all forgiven guys. I’m Den.’

“It would take a better person than me to have done that. I wouldn’t kill them. I wouldn’t hurt them. I’d rub it in.”

Dennis spoke on the radio Jun. 28, 2011 about Brandeis-Bardin: “Individuals make and break the world… Do you know how many organizations I’ve seen that were great because its leader was great and then the leader died or retired and the place became nothing? It just shriveled up and died.

“I know of what I speak on a personal level where the leader leaves and the people thought that what was great about the institutions was its policies, its methodologies. Doesn’t matter who led it. Then when good leaders left, the methodologies were useless.”

On the other hand, Mar. 23, 2010, Dennis said: “Leaders don’t make America, Americans make America… I don’t want leaders to shape America.”

“God was entirely opposed to having a king. The Israelites asked for a king. Instead, He just wanted the prophets to tell people what is right and wrong and let them lead their own lives.”

“I don’t want leaders. I have a leader — God. We lead ourselves in America. The very notion that leaders will lead us is left-wing.”

The notion that it is the left rather than the right who valorizes leaders is the opposite of reality. In his 2015 book, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood wrote about leadership:

Its principal supporters have been on the political right, influenced by a general belief in natural inequality and a broadly pessimistic view of the masses. In its extreme form this was reflected in the fascist ‘leader principle’, which holds that there is a single, supreme leader who alone is capable of leading the masses to their destiny, a theory derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) notion of the Übermensch (‘superman’). Among the supposed virtues of leadership are that it:

• Mobilizes and inspires people who would otherwise be inert and directionless

• Promotes unity and encourages members of a group to pull in the same direction

• Strengthens organizations by establishing a hierarchy of responsibilities and roles.

Liberals and socialists, on the other hand, have usually warned that leaders should not be trusted, and treated leadership as a basic threat to equality and justice.

So when is Dennis for leadership and when is Dennis opposed to leadership? It’s hard to avoid thinking that Dennis loves leadership when it allows him to assert himself above others and he doesn’t like leadership when it allows others to assert themselves above him. 

Rabbi Telushkin wrote about Dennis in his 1996 book, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal:

A friend of mine hosts a radio talk show. Although he passionately espouses often controversial political views, he makes it a point never to insult callers who dispute his positions. Rather, he listens carefully to what they say, and always responds courteously. He told me that he reads every letter from his listeners, particularly those written by people who clearly abhor his views.

If my friend sounds unusually open to others’ criticism, that is an acquired trait. In his early days as a public speaker, he often fended off his critics with sarcasm, biting wit, and occasional anger.

Contrary to Prager’s claims about having no interest in achieving political power, at age 15, Dennis was talking to his best friend Joseph Telushkin about what he would do in the U.S. Senate one day, long before he had a plausible political platform. Contrary to his claim of having no desire for the spotlight, Dennis will fly across the country for 90 seconds on the Sean Hannity Show.

How else am I so sure that Dennis lusted for power from a young age? Because that’s the way to get girls and Dennis from an early age was all about getting girls. An article entitled, “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature,” said in 2007: “Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. Reproductive access to women is the goal, political office but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.”

In his fifth lecture on Deuteronomy (in 2003), Dennis said: “Why anybody would go into public life when he is happy in what he is doing puzzles me entirely.”

Ronald Reagan

After voting for Jimmy Carter in 1976, Dennis never voted for a Democrat again. 

“The [1980] election of Ronald Reagan affected my happiness,” said Prager March 2, 2006. “There was a chance to turn this thing around.”

June 10, 2010 at the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library, Dennis said: “He was the first one to make me aware that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. That’s my motto but that’s his sentiment. He made me aware that this is not merely an economic difference between left and right but a philosophical and moral difference. It makes worse people, big government.”

On April 20, 2011, Dennis said: “It took until the Reagan administration to realize that if I didn’t fight, I was going to lose this country.”

Wow. So if Prager didn’t fight, America would be lost? Only one man can save us? Dennis Prager!

June 2, 2022, Dennis said: “Reagan changed me with one sentence. ‘Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.’ That is what made me a Republican. Everything resides on small government. In the 20th Century, 100 million civilians were murdered. Who murdered them? In every case but Rwanda, big government.”

In the Mishna, Rabbi Chanina, the deputy High Priest, said: “Pray for the welfare of the government (lit., monarchy), for if not for its fear, a person would swallow his fellow live.” Big government sometimes kills people but just as often saves people. In the absence of big government, we return to the state of nature where life tends to be “nasty, brutish and short.” 

For problems such as crime, pollution, and roads, most countries have found that government is the best solution. How else would you enforce standards? What countries that don’t have government provided police, parks and passports should America emulate? 

Religion On The Line

In 1982, KABC general manager George Green, a secular Jew, told educator Roberta Weintraub that he needed someone to host the two-hour public affairs Sunday night show Religion on the Line. She suggested Prager.

“I had my first tryout on radio at KABC Radio on a Sunday night in August [2], ’82,” said Dennis, “and I was so nervous, I was dripping [sweat]. And then, at 11 p.m., the program director [Wally Sherwin] slips me a note, ‘Tell them you’ll be on next Sunday night’ — one of the happiest moments of my life, because I ached to get my ideas out. I’m like a cow who has milk to give and I’ve been dying to give it my whole life. So I was engaged in interfaith dialogue every Sunday night with a priest, minister, rabbi for 10 years, and it is one of the things that changed my life.” (CSPAN 1995)

“I had a feeling that if I did well [on his radio debut],” said Prager Jan. 3, 2006, “that it would change my life.”

The show had a 35 share when Dennis inherited it and he took it to a 40 share (according to Prager’s 2008 lecture on 25 years in broadcasting).

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

Jan. 4, 2012, Dennis said: 

Like most people in radio, you are brought into it, rather than seek it. I was certainly thrilled. This was the dream of my life — to touch people with my values and my ideas.”

I had been a director of a Jewish institution in California where people came for weekends to study and be introduced to religion and other matters. Roberta Weintraub (head of the Los Angeles Board of Education) came for one weekend with her husband. She was friends with the then head of KABC, George Green. He said, I need a new host for this very popular show we have on, Religion on the Line. It was the most popular show in Los Angeles. It had a 40 share. He said to Roberta, ideally, I would want him to know a fair amount about religion, not be a clergyman, and know how to speak.

She had just heard me at this institution I directed. She said, I know this young kid and he knows religion. He’s not a clergyman. They tried me out and I got the job that night.

In a speech to Chabad of Orange County on Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said:

I am the worst candidate for the charge of religious intolerance… I was chosen to moderate the most popular show on religion in America on radio… I was chosen in part because I was so fair to the religions. Very often I would get a letter like this: ‘Dear Mr. Prager, I am an evangelical Christian and I was stunned to learn that you were Jewish.’ ‘Dear Mr. Prager, I am a Roman Catholic and I was stunned to learn that you were Jewish.’

Everybody thought I was their religion. Jews were also stunned. A religious Jew on the radio, it doesn’t make sense. He sounds coherent. A lot of secular Jews reacted that way.

My favorite moment on Religion on the Line was when a caller called in. I don’t know if he was anti-Semitic. I allow people their little prejudices. I did a whole show on Oriental drivers. Asians called in and asked why do we drive so fast.

One night a guy calls in and he starts giving the rabbi a really hard time. ‘Rabbi, isn’t it elitist and even racist for you Jews to think you are the Chosen People.’ This was a rabbi who was not terribly comfortable with the idea. He was on the more liberal end of the theological spectrum. He was queasy about the whole thing.

Father Michael Nocita comes on and says, ‘God chose the Jews. Get a life.’ The guy said OK.

I opened radio to Muslims. They were never part of the Religion on the Line. I deliberately sought them because it’s a major religion. I had Muslims on so often on Religion on the Line that they invited me to various mosques to speak. I was beloved in the Muslims community during the period of Religion on the Line because I had such respect. Nobody opened up a major media outlet like I opened up ABC Radio and I was rewarded with their affection and respect.

The first public demonstration I organized was on behalf of Muslims in Afghanistan.

One day the head of the station, George Green, called me into his office. I had a little lump in my throat. He didn’t call me in much… He said, ‘Dennis, I have a question. There’s something that doesn’t make sense. There was a woman who preceded you as the moderator of Religion on the Line. [Carole Hemingway]. This woman never once acknowledged she was a Jew. And I kept getting anti-Jewish, even anti-Semitic letters against her. You, every show you mention that you are a religious Jew and I’ve never once in five years gotten an anti-Semitic letter against you.

I felt like Joseph being called before Pharaoh. I said, ‘George, I think I know the answer. Non-Jews trust Jewish Jews more than they trust non-Jewish Jews’.

April 3, 2008, Dennis said: “My predecessor [Carole Hemingway] had an agenda — to make religion look stupid. She would ask priests if the Pope [masturbated]. I would never ask that. It’s disgusting.”

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

In the second edition of Ultimate Issues in 1985, Prager wrote: 

Right now there is something akin to a Holocaust taking place in Afghanistan…

The Soviets are, for all intents and purposes, destroying Afghanistan. Unless they are stopped, Afghanistan will cease to exist… Islam is being destroyed…

The Jewish nation, religion and culture have survived the Nazis. It is not likely that the Afghan nation, religion, and culture will comparably survive the Soviets…

We Jews must cry out on behalf of Afghanistan, and do so davka as Jews. Jewish organizations must speak out, take out ads and organize demonstrations to remind the world that we who endured the first Holocaust, have the duty to scream the loudest at events that approach its unique evil.

In 1986, after four years hosting Religion on the Line, “something dawned on me,” said Prager. “And I said it on the air. ‘The moment you realize that there are people in other religions whom you consider to be at least as good as you think you are, at least as intelligent as you think you are and at least as religious as you think you are, you will never be the same.’ When I would meet Christians and Muslims and Catholics, Protestants and so on, and people whom I so respected and who so clearly were God- and decency-oriented, I could no longer say, ‘There is only one true religion.’ It in no way lessened my belief in Judaism, but I now see other religions as vehicles to God for other people.” (CSPAN, 1995)

“Over the course of the next few years, I was given an increasing amount of radio time. First, an hour on Sunday night prior to Religion on the Line, then another hour, and then yet another hour. I ended up broadcasting for five hours – 7:00 PM to Midnight – on Sunday nights. Then I was given three hours on Saturday nights – for a total of eight hours on weekend nights. KABC’s Saturday and Sunday night listeners who didn’t like me must have been quite annoyed with how much I was on.” (CD)

“When I started in radio, I would actually smoke my pipe during the show.” (Dec. 16, 2010)

In a speech at the Nixon Library Mary 14, 2012 about his fifth book Still The Best Hope, Dennis said: 

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

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

On Aug. 27, 1985, Prager debated Rabbi Meir Kahane on the Ray Briem show. “It was one of the ugliest debates of my life,” says Dennis in a 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 15. “He was insulting the whole night.”

Dennis published a partial transcript of the debate published in his Fall 1985 edition of Ultimate Issues:

Briem: “Why in Israel, that always has had such compassion for people, invited the Arabs to come and stay in Israel when it was formed…would you want to kick them?”

Kahane: “Because the people of Israel and especially the Sephardic Jews of Israel, the Jews who came from Arab countries, didn’t learn about Arabs in seminars on the West Coast. They lived with Arabs, they know what it means to have lived under Arabs, and they’d never again want to.

“The problem is that the Arabs who live inside Israel hate Israel. And they understand that the Arabs, if they could, would do the Jews what they do to themselves every day in Beirut. They don’t want that to happen. They’re not troubled by the niceties of Western democracy.”

“I don’t hate Arabs. I love Jews. And I intend to save the Jewish people, both from Arabs and from themselves.”

Briem: “Where does your policy differ — other than doing away with them in a concerted campaign — from what Hitler did to the Jews?”

Kahane: “If you really mean that question, I’m astounded. The Jews of Germany never ever said, ‘This country is really ours, the Germans stole it from us, and when we become the majority, we’ll take it back and call it Israel.’ The German Jews wanted nothing more than to be the best Germans that ever lived. And the Arabs don’t want to be Jews or Israelis.”

“The Arabs say, ‘The Jews stole this country from us, we were the majority once, we want this country back, when we have it back it will be Palestine.’ And if there is anyone…who thinks that there is one Arab in Israel who would rather live in a country which is defined legally as the Jewish state, he has greater contempt for the Arabs than I thought that even liberals could have.”

“There is a basic contradiction between Zionism and Western democracy. A Jewish state at the very minimum means a state with a majority of Jews, because only in that way can Jews solve their own destiny, be masters of their own fate. Western democracy postulates the basic axiom that it doesn’t matter who’s the majority. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or non-Jewish, whoever’s the majority is it. Therefore there is a basic contradiction, since most western Jews are basically schizophrenic, with one foot inside Judaism and the other half inside western culture, and they would like to believe that Judaism is Thomas Jefferson. It isn’t.”

Prager: “I’d like to defend Judaism from the smear campaign that Meir Kahane has directed against it.”

“[Kahane] is [antisemitism’s] tragic echo, produced to a large extent by the Holocaust and by the Arab desire to destroy Israel. He is a classic product of Jews being hated for all these centuries, and he has incorporated a mirror image of the non-Jew in his psyche. He hates non-Jews as he feels non-Jews hate him. His answer to Arafat is to be the Jewish Arafat.”

“Ray, you asked him, and he dismissed it as a lunacy, what really differentiates Meir Kahane’s attitude to Arabs from Hitler’s to German Jews. He didn’t answer you, because the difference is minimal.”

“This is a Jewish fascist. It is a tragedy that he cites that he is rooted in Judaism when there isn’t anything normative in Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative or Reform — that supports him.”

“One could cry over the fact that there is some popularity to someone who has such views when the Torah instructs the Jew to love the stranger because the Jews themselves were strangers in Egypt and know how it feels to be one.”

Kahane: “The Torah and the Talmud say any appointment of authority in Israel shall only be Jewish. That’s not democracy. Maimonides states clearly that no non-Jew shall ever be appointed over a Jew, even as a clerk concerning the water carriers.”

“Judaism states clearly that the Jews, when they create a Jewish state, will not grant citizenship to a non-Jew.”

Brien: “Dennis, Rabbi Meir Kahane has said here recently that the rationale for wanting to push all of the 730,000 Arabs out of Israel and the occupied territories, is that they hate Israel and Israelies. They think it is still Palestine and they resent it, they can never coexist because of that, and because of their birthrate one of these days they are going to become a majority.”

Prager; “It is the lie upon which Rabbi Kahane predicates his case, and it should be exposed as such. Let me cite just a handful of statistics. The Arab population of Israel was 11.1% in 1960. As of the last census last year it is 17%. In 1965, the average Israeli Arab had 8.4 children. In 1981 it went down to 5. The jews are at 2.7 and rising. They [the rates] are in fact going to meet as industrialization continues, Arabs leave their farms and so on. Basically, the rabbi bases his ideas on waht I have to call a lie, that Israel will cease to be a Jewish state given simple demographics.”

“Rabbi Kahane is by and large considered in the Jewish world an immoral aberration.”

Kahane: “Assuming the Arabs would become a majority, what would Dennis Prager say?”

Prager: “In theory, the Jewish state has a right to remain a Jewish state. Just as during WWII, England suspended certain democratic processes.”

Caller1: “Mr. Prager, do you believe that the Arabs, if they have a chance to destroy Israel, will do that?’

Prager: “Most Arabs would.”

Caller1: “Then from that standpoint alone you must admit that Mr. Kahane has a reason for doing that [throwing Arabs out] because the Arabs will unite and destroy Israel the first chance they get.”

Prager: “Yes, but one of the reasons that it is important to have a Jewish state is in order to preserve Judaism. But if Israel becomes like its Arab neighbors in moral outlook, then the only difference between a Kahaneized Israel and an Arafatized Jordan is the language they speak. So Israel’s reason for being, if it becomes a state as morally low as many of its neighbors, [is undermined]. Israel can continue to be a light unto the nations, as a democratic state in the midst of tyranny, and need not be compromised just because of its enemies.”

Kahane: “If all the Arabs tomorrow become saints, and I was now living in a state with 730,000 Arab saints who in 20 years will be two and a half or three million Arab saints, and in 30 years will be the majority of the country but saintly, I don’t want to live as a minority under any saints.”

Caller4: “I would rather see a strong Israel that everybody hates, rather than an Auschwitz that everyone loves.”

Prager: “I agree with you… Part of the giveaway on Rabbi Kahane’s moral understanding is as he said, ‘even if all the Arabs were saints.’ In other words, the issue is not morality, it is race. It is Arab blood that is detested, not Arab morality. In other words, no matter how decent they might be, he wants to kick them out. Morality is foreign to his understanding. it is a blood-based understanding.” 

Kahane: “You know very well taht if any Arab came to me and said, I would like to become Jewish, and he converted according to the proper standards, of course, just as any other non-Jew, that he would be welcome, blood and all… My problem with the Arabs has nothing to do with their blood. It’s that they want Jewish blood.”

Prager: “You respect [Arabs] so much that you want to chase them out.”

Kahane: “Exactly.”

Dennis concluded in his journal: “Neither rationally nor morally can Kahane be distinguished from other religious extremists, including antisemites. He is a Jewish version of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the medieval Christian crusader.”

Dennis published a page showing parallels between Kahane’s legislation and the Nazi laws against Jews.

Dec. 13, 2001, Prager said that almost all of Kahane’s proposed laws for Israel (such as making it a crime for a Jew to sleep with a non-Jew, to swim in the ocean with a non-Jew, etc) came from Torah Law.

Wikipedia said: “Kahane’s legislative proposals focused on transferring the Arab population out from the Land of Israel, revoking Israeli citizenship from non-Jews, and banning Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations, based on the Code of Jewish Law compiled by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah.”

In late 1983, Prager replaced the retiring Hilly Rose on AM 790 KABC from 7-9 p.m. during the week (except Friday night). Initially the station balked at giving Dennis Friday night off, but he refused to do the show if it would force him to violate the Sabbath.

Prager wrote a regular column for the now defunct Los Angeles Herald-Tribune. He wanted to write a weekly column for the Jewish Journal but Editor Gene Lichtenstein thought Prager was a bad writer. Gene liked Dennis in person but found his writing pompous.

Dennis became convinced that he was turned down because of politics, even though Gene regularly published somebody to the right of Dennis — Orthodox rabbi Dov Aharoni.

Walter Martin

The Los Angeles Times wrote Feb. 19, 1989:

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

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

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

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

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

“He doesn’t have a good word for anyone who isn’t identified with his theology,” Prager says.

In a 1990 lecture series on how to be a good person, Dennis Prager said:

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

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

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

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

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

Marc B. Shapiro, who teaches at a Jesuit university, said:

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

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

Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism

In 1983, Prager and Telushkin published their second book — Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism:

Finally…our thanks to Janice Prager who, despite her time-consuming work on a book on Jewish moral values for children, was the single greatest source of suggestions, criticisms, and morale boosting…

…[T]hough numbering less than 3 percent of the American population, [Jews] have won 27% of the Nobel prizes awarded American scientists, that Jews are overrepresented in medicine by 231 percent in proportion to the general population, in psychiatry by 478 percent, in dentistry by 299 percent, in law by 265 percent, and in mathematics by 238 percent, that American Jews are twice as likely as non-Jews to go to college, and that they are represented in Ivy League schools over five times their percentage in the population. This Jewish passion for study in turn helps to explain why Jews have the highest income of any ethnic group in the United States, earning 72% more than the national average, and 40% more than the Japanese, the second highest earning ethnic group.

This unique intellectual achievement is not due, as is sometimes alleged, to some innately superior intelligence among Jews, but solely and directly to Judaism.

Historian Albert S. Lindemann classified Why The Jews? as “Jewish self-flattery” and noted: “More sophisticated statements of similar ideas can be found in George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (New York, 1974), and Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles (New York, 1924).” (Esau’s Tears, pg. 20)

Joseph Sobran wrote in the August 5, 1983 issue of National Review:

To Prager and Telushkin, all Gentiles past a certain point seem to look alike. Enlightenment anti-Semitism wanted to include Jews, not shut them out. It attacked their particularism for its own reasons; wrongly, perhaps, but still not out of a consistent value-system, and not because it resented what it saw as the “higher quality of Jewish life.”

In fact, most people in the West have tended to look on Jews as backward, not superior. The popular sociology that made “jew” and “gyp” slang terms for sharp dealing may have been crude and cruel, but it hardly expressed a sense that Jewish and Gypsy life were worthy of envy…

Ultimate Issues

In 1985 Dennis launched his personal journal of thought, the quarterly Ultimate Issues, which never quite achieved 10,000 subscribers. It became The Prager Perspective in 1996 and folded in the year 2000. “I wrote it because I never wanted to be edited…” (Prager CD)

In 1985 and 1986, Prager received commendations on his journal from William F. Buckley, Richard John Neuhaus, Martin Peretz, and rabbis W. Gunther Plaut, Rabbi Norman Lamm, and Rabbi Jakob J. Petuchowski.

Prager began selling cassette tapes and eventually VHS tapes of his lectures through Ultimate Issues. “It was actually the Ayatollah Khomeini who made me aware of the power of tapes. If he led an Islamic fundamentalist revolution through tapes, I figured, why not do the same for Judaism and ethical monotheism?” (Ultimate Issues, Jan – Mar 1991, pg. 11)

Janice Adelstein

In 1978, Dennis was on a date with a pretty blonde. He sensed that she would go to bed with him. Then he thought, “Is this what my life is about? Going to bed with pretty blondes?” (9/13/02)

“I was 30 years old. I was at Mario’s Italian restaurant in Westwood. I was having pizza. I was with a very attractive blonde. It seemed to me that she was attracted to me and that we could’ve gotten something on. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, if this was ten years ago or even a year ago, I’d be thrilled to know that I could have this woman. This is awesome. But I don’t want to go through this over and over. It is about time I want to have something deeper in life. I want to get married. I had all these religious values inculcated. And I want depth in everything. I don’t like the superficial’.” (Second lecture in a Spring 1999 series on male sexuality)

In his 22nd lecture on Deuteronomy in 2004, Dennis said: “I wouldn’t say this on radio, I think. I say almost everything on radio but this is very personal. I was living a very active bachelor life while being a good guy. I was always a good guy. I don’t have a mean streak… One day it hits me, Dennis, you may be good, but you sure as hell ain’t holy, thinking about my social life and whatever you can guess. That is what started me on the road to getting married. It wasn’t, oh gee, I’m lonely, because there are ways of assuaging loneliness without getting married. I realized, D.P, you can’t fool yourself. If you believe in this book and its values, you are leading half of what it wants. What about holy? A few years later, I got married… Now you say, that’s not romantic. The decision isn’t romantic. It was a values-based decision. This is not the type of life I should be leading. It was based solely on this [Torah]. It didn’t come from my heart or from my conscience. Love? I could have love every night or however frequently I was in love. Love was hardly the thing to direct me to marriage. I loved her and her and her.”

In a 1992 lecture on Genesis 27, Dennis said: “Definitely partake in all permitted pleasures. It’s not even a question. God won’t even bother asking [me on Judgment Day]. He’ll ask, why did you partake of some non-permitted pleasures?”

March 24, 2008 at Nessah Synagogue, Dennis said: “The power of sex is so great that a lot of people who shouldn’t marry marry because the sex before marriage was so terrific and it blinded them to what really would’ve hurt their marriage because of the passion the sex engendered.”

Therapist Mark Smith says: “There are three ways you can be in a relationship with anybody and the first one is enmeshed [followed usually by emotional cut-off and possibly by inter-dependence]. When a couple becomes enmeshed, they fall in love. It’s intoxicating. It’s what all the songs on the radio are about. It changes your brain chemistry. The only downside to getting enmeshed is that it don’t last.”

“It starts with enmeshment and there’s a slow fade. The shelf life for enmeshment in a young marriage is usually seven years. In second marriages, you get more like two years. When you’re not talking, it becomes cut-off. To keep from feeling the pain, you fill in with other stuff such as work, the kid, the sister, and that third person being there stabilizes the system. Someone with a big empty hole might just give up and get divorced. We’re shooting to be inter-dependent, which is not by working on the marriage, but by working on yourself. We espouse being in recovery. Everybody needs to be in recovery for something. Recovery is rebuilding your personality from the ground up. It’s harder when you’re 73, it’s easier when you’re in your 30s. When marriages cause enough pain that people seek therapy, usually starts at about 35. People under 30 generally haven’t been run over by enough trucks and they’re still well-defended psychologically and they’re not ready.”

“We arrange [to have stuff done to us]. We think about relationships as stuff is done to us…but we marry our issues. You choose to put yourself in a place where you are abandoned. Consciously nobody looks to be betrayed but unconsciously is where we make our decisions.”

“When you’re abandoned as a kid, and your spouse steps away from you, it can trigger rage.”

Feb. 22, 2012, Dennis said: “In my late 20s, I was at dinner with a couple… They were just married. She said, ‘How’s racquetball going?’ I said, ‘It’s great. We get great exercise. We’re closely matched so we have great games. And we get a bonus. After a games, we go outside and sit on a bench in the hallway and watch these women go by.’

“Then she said, ‘[My husband] does not look.’ I was about to spit out the food I was eating when I got such a kick from [the hubby] under the table. The kick was clear. You are to answer what she wants to hear and not tell the truth.

“After choking, I said, ‘Of course not. I look, but not [the husband].’

“I remember taking an internal vow that I would never marry where I had to hide who I was.”

After reading George Gilder’s book, Men and Marriage, one of the five books he said that most influenced him, Dennis decided that he should marry quickly. “It was one of the reasons I said, ‘I don’t care, I’m getting married soon. I’m doing it with my head if not my heart’.” (July 6, 2011)

Then Dennis met Janice Adelstein.

Though beautiful, Janice did not have a reputation for brilliance. “Don’t get sick, remember who’s the nurse,” was a joke at the time on campus.

All three of Prager’s wives have been tall and striking. The first was brunette and the last two have been blonde.

Max Prager wrote in chapter 35:

In the summer of 1980, Dennis met Janice Adelstein, a nurse at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Hilda and I were then visiting BBI and we both liked her immediately when our son informed us that he was interested in her as a prospective spouse. She was tall, pretty, charismatic and wise; a perfect candidate to be our daughter-in-law. We met her parents, Malvina and Jack and found them to be ideal machitonim (in-laws). Ten months later, on January 15, 1981, they were wed in the House of the Book at BBI which was situated on a hill with the most amazing scenery. Since Dennis was the Director, he invited all the members of the Institute to the wedding which was held around 1 PM.

The total number of guests including family, friends and members totaled a figure in excess of 500. After the ceremony, a reception was held with plenty of food and dancing. The two families then retired to their respective homes to redress and prepare for another reception at the Sephardic Temple on Wilshire Blvd. To this event, we invited 200 guests and had a wonderful evening with catered food, music and dancing.

Dennis’s first marriage went bad quickly and the couple hoped that having a child would revive their relationship. It did not. 

“It’s the tragedy of my life,” said Dennis. “I wish I was not divorced.” (June 22, 2010)

April 2, 2014, Dennis said that assuming two decent people, “in the overwhelming majority of instances, closing in on the word always, it is the wife who determines more whether the marriage will be a happy one… That’s why we have the saying, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’ Most decent men want to come home to peace… Aside from my own life, [my theory that the wife determines the happiness of the marriage] has been true in every marriage I have known.”

“I knew more about zebras than I did about women before I got married,” said Dennis in a 2003 lecture on Deut 7:22-8:10. “I didn’t know how they thought, how they felt. All I knew was how they looked.”

June 9, 2010, Dennis said he prefers a relationship with no conflict.

May 9, 2012, Dennis said: “The thought of coming home to non-peace is the nightmare of my life.”

Sept. 16, 2013, Dennis said: “I took one of those [birth] breathing classes. I contended at the time I was the only person who took that class and failed. I read books. I can’t tell you how boring I found it. Also, who lives by it? You have all these medical personnel around. What is this lay person going to tell his wife on breathing? For much of history, the guy waited outside the room and someone announced, ‘It’s a boy or girl’ and the guy bought cigars and everyone went home.”

“I was there at his birth and I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“My father never saw me born. It didn’t affect me. He was at the hospital.”

Max Prager wrote in chapter 36:

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

Said Dennis in a 1995 lecture on Exodus 5:

I grew up Orthodox where it was taken for granted that every Jew who died in the Middle Ages because he wouldn’t convert to Christianity was a martyr sanctifying G-d’s name. And they were. I accept that totally.

When I had my first child, I saw them differently. As a single young man, martyrdom was clearly the option to take. If somebody said to me today, accept X or we will kill your family, I don’t know what I’d do.

Said Dennis in a 1992 lecture on Genesis 16-17: “When my son [David] was circumcised, I cried more than I ever recall crying from the deepest sense of meaning and joy. To know that I was doing what Jews have done for over 3,000 years… I was privy to circumcisions done in Russia in secret. My son’s circumcision was the most bonding thing I’ve done to the Jewish people. Nothing was as primal, as gut-wrenching emotion as that moment. I passionate believe in it.”

Said Dennis in a 1993 lecture on Genesis 29, “The amount of psychological garbage people bring to marriage. The choice is frequently not made even consciously, but subconsciously, things worked out from one’s upbringing, I am almost tempted to pass a law that you can not have a child in your first marriage for five years. Ideally, people will all start with their second marriage because so much nonsense is worked out with the first one.”

Janice co-authored the children’s book, Why Be Different: A Look Into Judaism.



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

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

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

There’s a cottage industry of people attacking Dennis Prager personally. Those who hate him look for his weaknesses and they often think they’ve found them in his two divorces.

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

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

Oct. 11, 2010, Dennis told a caller named Sam: “I don’t judge people by their thoughts. I judge people by their actions. If a person has the most racist thoughts on earth, but acts beautifully towards people of every race that person is not a racist. In your view, that person is a racist.”

Sam: “That person is inhuman because it is impossible…”

Dennis: “No. You’re wrong. That is not true. Then it is inhuman for every man to stay faithful because every man wants to have an extra-marital affair.”

Sam: “Do you want to have extra-marital affairs? I don’t.”

Dennis: “Yes. You don’t? Then you are lying to me and you are lying to yourself. You are the only man I’ve met who has actually said that with a straight face.

“You have no desire for any woman then your wife?”

Sam: “I do not.”

Dennis: “OK. You are amazing. Then you are a phenomenon.”

“Sam represented something that I have noted since graduate school — a profound amount of fooling oneself because of unpleasant reality.”

“Sam’s call will be the subject of a male-female hour. I’m going to play it. Men who lie about their own nature to themselves and why would they do that. One huge thing that gay and heterosexual men have in common is a desire for variety and immediate stimulation through the visual. For a man to deny that he has any desire for another woman sexually is to lie to himself in a way that frightens me.”

“Obviously it is a statement about my wife that I can be so open about this on the radio and have zero thought about how would she react.”

“I knew as a bachelor in my twenties that I couldn’t live with someone from whom I had to hide my nature. And that’s what he has to do apparently. It shook me up. Truth is the most important value.”

Said Dennis Oct. 12, 2011: “That’s like saying you have no desire for any other kind of food. I like steak, I have no desire for pasta, pizza, lamb chops…”

In a (2008?) lecture on Deut. 23:19, Dennis said about his first divorce:

It’s a dramatic moment, even if all the civil stuff has been worked out.

Divorce is a Mitzva is a great book. [Rabbi Perry Netter] says that the beauty of Jewish ritual is that God is with you when you marry and He’s with you when you divorce.

We were at the Bet Din of Los Angeles. I arrived before my soon-to-be ex-wife. He starts talking to me. The man is an older man with a long grey beard from Poland. Classic Orthodox Jew rabbi [Shmuel Katz].

I come in and he says, ‘Dennis Prager! I love your show!’

I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone. I could not believe the guy knew me from Adam let alone listen to the radio. He looked like a guy who didn’t even own a radio.

We make small talk. I said, ‘Rabbi, it must be difficult for you a traditional Orthodox rabbi to be the head of the Beit Din in Southern California. That must be really tough for you with all of these divorces.’

Then the man blew my mind. He said, ‘Mr. Prager, that’s not the case at all. There were a lot of marriage in the old country that should have ended in divorce and didn’t.’

To come out of this face behind a big grey beard, I was astonished, but that man spoke from the depths of Orthodoxy in a very Jewish manner. He knew many miserable couples in the old country because there was so much stigma.

As life would have it, he was the rabbi on this particular Religion on the Line [in 1988]… I pick the topic, what is your religion’s attitude to divorce? All three clergy, including him, said the same thing. People divorce too easily.

In round two, I asked, do you know anybody very well who divorced? The rabbi said his parents divorced. It was important that they do so.”

None of the clergy (including Father Gregory Coiro, whose parents divorced) knew anybody well who had divorced easily.
I don’t know anybody who divorced for trivia. Did Prince [Charles] divorce because he found a prettier woman? Or because the idiot royalty rules said he had to marry a virgin? Instead of marrying a partner in life who happened not to be a virgin. So everybody’s life got screwed up. And the royalty looked ridiculous. Nobody would now argue that the woman he is now married to [Camilla] is prettier than Diana. But that was his partner. That’s who he should have married.

We tend to overstate the effects of divorce on children over the long term. If the two parents don’t belittle each other…

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

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

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

“I can’t stand bad grammar. We all have our thing.” 

Monogamy

A 2007 article noted, “Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

“Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.” 

Aug. 19, 2010, Dennis said:

I had just entered my teens when Dr. No came out. And I vowed to attend every one in part because of the women. Whoever had the job of selecting the women for James Bond films, if you believe in karma, this person had to be a saint in a previous life.

One element of James Bond’s success is that you always know that good will triumph over the evil.

Second. Good guys are not usually having fun and he does. The good guy is rewarded in this world — look at those women, outfits, cars.

August 20, 2010, author Sinclair McKay said: “You wonder how sustainable a life that is? You’d worry if a friend of yours lived a life like that.”

Dennis: “Why not fantasize that?”

Sinclair: “The nature of the fantasy has changed over the years to the more austere Daniel Craig version we see today. He’s almost monogamous.”

Dennis groans. “I have to be monogamous. I don’t want James Bond to have to be.”

“I didn’t go to the [James Bond] film to watch monogamy.” 

March 22, 2013, Dennis said: “I’m a big believer in and practitioner of monogamy, but there a lot of sins in marriage that could be worse [than adultery]. I’d rather live with someone who had a brief affair than somebody who mistreated me every day and stayed faithful. Whenever I hear of somebody decent who had an affair, I also want to know what if anything precipitated it… Decent people who have an affair, it’s usually a symptom of something going on.”

Dec. 18, 2013, Dennis said: “Married people should not flirt. My wife and I are so open [about what we think], there’s no elephant in the room because I can be so honest with her. As liberal as I am with thought, that is how strict I am on behavior.”

“My wife knows, we’re driving along, and it will blow her mind that I will notice a woman in a short skirt two blocks away, and I don’t mean little blocks. Or a woman is walking a dog and my wife will notice the dog and I’ll notice the woman.”

In a 1992 lecture on Genesis 2, Dennis said: “Watching my child grow up, I kept saying to my wife, ‘He’s still in the Garden of Eden.’ …The innocence overwhelmingly is a sexual innocence. It still amazes me that my son will run to the baseball magazine section at a newsstand because he’s not going to run to that section in a couple of years. There will be another section that he will gravitate to first. So long as he’s still running over with lust to Topp’s Baseball Weekly, I’ll know he’s not fully left the Garden of Eden, though I get some reports he’s moving in the other direction… I don’t want him to forever gravitate to the baseball magazine section. I’d be worried. On the other hand, I don’t want him to be a lecher.”

Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

[R]espectable publications have started to discuss a major reason why the AIDS rate is so high in black Africa: the tendency of women to have “multiple concurrent relationships.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divorce

Dennis: “I had religious relatives who did not sleep in the same room together for the last 20 years of their lives. They hated each other. That’s a marriage that was saved. They never divorced. And they didn’t divorce because it would’ve been a shanda in the Orthodox community in which they lived. They couldn’t show their face at shul if they divorced. So the children grew up with parents who hated each other and that took a terrible toll on those children.” (March 24, 2008)

Dec. 2, 2009, Dennis Prager said: “Conservatives read divorce statistics as an immediate indictment of the morality of a society. I see it more as tragedy than as evil. I don’t have this image that people just divorce at the drop of a hat. Maybe they exist. I never met them. Everybody I know who divorced divorced after hell, after years of therapy, of trying and hell, including me.”

Prager CD: “The week my marriage broke up [8/86], I was fired from my daily radio job, I had no money to speak of and was living at my friend’s [director Jerry Zucker] house because I could not afford an apartment.” 

After the divorce, an arrangement was made between the Pragers and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC). Janice was hired as a fundraiser and Dennis agreed to speak regularly for the center. This helped him with the alimony and it gave them a speaker who attracted people to attend co-sponsored events at places such as the Stephen S. Wise temple.

Janice kept her last name of Prager. She dressed provocatively in her new role, much to the delight of the YULA boys next door. She particularly favored skintight pants that left little to the imagination.

Rabbi Meyer May had Sidney Green groom Janice and the bimbo squad. They’d dress sexy and go to parties and hook in male donors. They had a list to contact. The number one girl at this task was Janice. She would go to Palm Springs or wherever there was money to be raised. She got a paid membership at a pricey workout place thanks to the SWC.

Janice loved to tell spicy stories about the men she met. Janice said that prior to her marriage, she worked as a nurse in a fertility facility where her job was to distribute erotic magazines to the male patients and then collect the semen.

On May 13, 1987, Janice Prager sued Dennis Prager (Case Number: D191749).

Until David Prager graduated high school in 2001, Janice, Dennis and his second wife Fran could be seen chatting together at Shalhevet events.

Around 1998, Janice married for the third, and presumably, final time. 

Therapy

In 1986, Dennis entered therapy for almost a year with the late psychiatrist Samuel Eisenstein. During his few intense sessions, Dennis at one point doubled up with pain. Another time, when he related a traumatic story from his childhood, Dr. Eisenstein replied that he doubted the story happened the way Prager described it. Dennis wanted to punch him. (Related by Prager at a Sabbath morning sermon he gave at Stephen S. Wise Temple in the Spring of 1998.)

Dr. Eisenstein published this letter in the Oct – Dec, 1990 edition of Ultimate Issues:

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

“Most people do [need therapy],” said Dennis July 12, 2013. “That included me. Very early on in my life, I wanted to figure out things that plagued me. It was brief but very powerful. The man I went to was a giant. I thought I was in the room with Freud. He had a German accent. He had a German-Jewish name. He was much older than me. All he needed was a cigar.”

On Dec. 24, 2010, Dennis said: “When my first marriage had ended [in 1986], I wanted to really try to insure I would never divorce again and that I would marry right so I went for counseling on these matters with the woman that I was dating, and [psychiatrist Stephen S. Marmer] was recommended, and after the session, I said to the woman, ‘I want this man as a friend, to hell with the therapy.’ At the same time, he was thinking, ‘I would really like to be friends with him.’

“And so that is what happened. The three of us, Dr. Marmer, Allen Estrin and our spouses have gotten together virtually every Sabbath for the past 20-something years. After synagogue, we get together. It is an anchor of happiness in my life.”

On Dec. 4, 2013, Dennis reacted with scorn to Deborah Solomon’s biography of Norman Rockwell which alleged the illustrator might’ve been gay: “This is under the title of why I don’t love the left. Norman Rockwell is one of my favorite artists. He painted the America I dream about, and which I think existed in large measure. We have produced the best society that humans make.”

“I would’ve had the author on if she didn’t do this.”

“May I hereby announce that I Dennis Prager [also] have an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men. It’s not hidden… If I can’t hug and be close to my male friends, I feel bereft and impoverished in my emotional life. And ‘that his marriages might’ve been a strategy to control his homo-erotic desires’? Is that unbelievable? That I can’t announce for myself. I am unaware of any homo-erotic desires in me but that’s only because I’m probably not liberated enough. This is what I mean by the left damages whatever it touches… The sheer chutzpah. But she says, ‘Of course I never suggested he was gay.’ OK.”

In the Summer 1987 edition of Ultimate Issues, Prager wrote that his four year-old son David, in the six months during which his parents separated, became obsessed with making and shooting toy guns. David asked his dad if there were “bad monsters.” Dennis said yes. David proceeded to kill them.

After six months, David said he did not have to kill any more bad monsters and showed no further interest in guns and shooting.

Said Dennis in a 2001 lecture on Numbers 22, 23:

I’ll give you the worst story. It’s now a family joke. I have rarely lost my temper at my kids. I don’t have much of a temper, or I control it well. But there was one time that I can recall when I did lose my temper with my older boy. He’s not one that provoked me much. He’s a very easy child. He was about four years old. It was about 3 a.m. and he wouldn’t go to bed. He kept coming in. When you lose sleep, you really lose control. I threw him into his bed. And he said to me, ‘Daddy, I’m not a baseball.’

I just lost control. I lay next to him. I stayed the whole night with him. He has no recollection of this.

“I raised my kids in Los Angeles,” said Dennis. “I remember when my older son had LA Laker pictures up in his room. One day I said to him, ‘David, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ He said, ‘Black’. I knew it was a good day in America.” (April 21, 2010)

Income

Mar. 23, 2012, Dennis said: “Through age 40 [1988], I made about $65,000 a year. I had a [radio] salary of $35,000 a year and I supplemented it with lectures.”On an April 3, 2023 Youtube video with 23-year-old Harvard graduate Julie Hartman, Dennis said: “I lost a very significant amount of money by being conservative. My [primary] mode of income until the age of 40 [1988] was speaking in the Jewish community in America. I was the third most booked speaker. When I became a well-known conservative, it all dried up. My entire income outside of a very tiny income from local radio. I lost money saying what I believed.”

The Myth Of Heterosexual AIDS

In the November 1987 issue of Commentary magazine, Michael Fumento published an essay entitled, “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.”

Dennis Prager immediately took up the topic on his radio show. “I almost got fired because it was such a sensitive issue,” Dennis recalled Dec. 9, 2010.

Circa 1998, Dennis interviewed a city manager in Southern California where all city employees had to agree to not smoke. That way the city could reduce their health insurance bills. Aghast, Dennis asked the manager if all employees had to agree to avoid anal sex as that could transmit deadly disease. The manager said no. Prager later said he regretted his question.

Happiness

During 1986, Prager began assembling material for his third book – Why Don’t All Good People Hate Communism? But instead of doing a book on evil, he ended up writing one on happiness.

Prior to 1986, when Dennis was asked about happiness, he said it was a selfish pursuit. “People would ask me to speak on happiness and I would say no. Did I want to write a book on happiness? I would say no. And I would say why. I believed that the only people who got happier from lectures on happiness and books on happiness were the lecturers and the authors as they cashed their checks.

“I had the same view of happiness as I’m sure you do that it is nice to be happy but it is not a moral goal… I regarded it as a selfish request.” (YICC lecture, June 13, 2010)

Shlomo Schwartz, the rabbi of the UCLA Chabad, called Dennis in 1986 to arrange for him to lecture to students at his Lubavitch synagogue on Gailey Ave.

“I assume you want me to speak on religion,” Dennis said.

“Oh no,” said Rabbi Schwartz, best known as ‘Schwartzie.’ “No one will show up if you do. I would like you to speak on a light subject.”

“Like what?”

“Like happiness.”

“But happiness isn’t a light subject,” said Dennis. “Happiness is a serious problem.”

“That’s a great title,” said Schwartzie. (From Prager’s lecture on happiness to the UCLA Chabad)

On June 13, 2010, at YICC, Dennis Prager said: 

So I gave a talk to UCLA Jewish students… I don’t know how many showed up. It was not standing room only. I brought my recorder. I was sure I would never give another talk on happiness. I record all my talks. It’s a good thing because I am misquoted often and then I have proof whether I am misquoted or not. For 30 years, I have been sending out my lectures to people who subscribe to my lectures. I take the best of the month and I send them out. I figured, if this is good, I’ll send this one out. It’s so different from everything else I was talking about at the time — God’s existence, good and evil…

Not only did I like it, I did something that I had never done before and haven’t done since — I listened to my own talk through when I got home. I don’t like hearing me any more than you like hearing you.

Not only did I listen to it, but I kept going, ‘Yeah, good point.’ I was listening to somebody else tell me things about happiness.

I made it available to the subscribers and never thought about it again.

A half year later, I receive a call. ‘Dennis Prager, boy have I been hunting you down. This is so-and-so from Redbook magazine in New York… I heard your lecture on happiness… I never heard of you in my life. I heard it on the radio here in New York.

I said, ‘You heard my lecture on happiness on the radio in New York?’

It turns out at the time this Jewish run station WEVD, basically a bunch of ganafim, a bunch of crooks, they did something for which they could lose their license. They played an entire lecture with no permission, forget no fee. Believe me, I would’ve given them permission. I would’ve paid them to do it. But it was totally illegal. Absolutely illegal. Thanks to these crooks, my life has changed and I have changed thousands of lives.”

She said, ‘I sat in my car in front of my brownstone on the East Side till it was finished to find out who it was. Would you like to write an article for Redbook?’

I said, on what? I had no idea.

She said, on happiness. Is $3,000 OK?

You have to understand, it’s an immense amount today for an article. When I would write for Commentary [magazine], do you know what I would receive? Six copies of that issue to give to friends and relatives.

My reaction was — I was right. The only people who get happy from happiness lectures and from happiness books are the authors as they cash their checks. This was more than I made from all of my article writing put together.

Had the woman had said, $11.62, I would’ve said fine.

I wrote the article and it was published in Redbook.

Then I got a call from Reader’s Digest. Can we abridge your article and put it in our international editions? I thought, that’s really exciting. Me in Estonian! I said go ahead.

Then I got a call from Random House. We’d like you to write a book. These are great ideas.

People meantime are reacting to the lecture more than any other lecture I ever gave.

I thought, maybe I do have something to say here. I’ll test it out.

I decided to give an eight-session course on happiness at the University of Judaism. Do I have eight 90-minute statements to make? I did. I still wasn’t sure I had a book. So I gave a 16-session course on happiness. That’s 24 hours. If I can speak for 24 hours no baloney no fat on happiness, I convinced myself I had a book.

I said yes to Random House. Five years later, I didn’t have a book. I gave them all their money back, which was painful, because, needless to say, it was spent. Then Harper Collins asked again and it was published [in 1998] with Harper Collins.

Prager’s UCLA lecture tape on happiness became his best seller.

In the jacket of these tapes, Prager predicted a publication date of 1990 for his book. He was off by seven years. Writing Happiness Is A Serious Problem became a serious problem.

Dennis said: “We would have great art if people were happy but we wouldn’t have genocide if people were happy, we wouldn’t have lynchings if people were happy, we wouldn’t have anti-Semitism if people were happy. Happy people don’t walk around hating groups.”

“We Jews are more influenced by secular society than we influence secular society. It’s my single greatest lament about Jewish life. We don’t give out our values. We don’t even know which ones to give.”

On Jan. 29, 1999, Dennis Prager did his first dedicated happiness hour on his radio show. It became a weekly occurrence in the second hour of every Friday show. He even did it on the Friday following 9/11.

Said Dennis Jul. 29, 2011: “A general-themed [radio] show does not exist. This is the only one I know of… The breadth of subjects committed to is broader than other shows. I took a gamble when I did it.”

Mar. 28, 2013, Dennis said: “I comport with the conservative love of non-turbulence. I am not bored by my society enjoying itself, by my society continuing with obvious fixes where things are broken, but I don’t want turbulence. In private life, every one of you knows a drama queen, people who thrive on emotional turbulence. The left thrives on social turbulence. It comports with every poll done — people on the left are less happy than people on the right. When you are not happy, you think the world around you is awry and you thrive on turbulence. This feeds the left-wing love of change and drama and radical transformation because what exists now doesn’t make them happy.”