Dennis Mark Prager (/ˈpreɪɡər/; born August 2, 1948)[1] is an American conservative radio talk show host and writer. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show The Dennis Prager Show. In 2009, he co-founded PragerU, which primarily creates five-minute videos from an American conservative perspective, among other content.
His initial political work starting in 1969 concerned Refuseniks, the Soviet Jews who were unable to emigrate.[2] He gradually began offering more and broader commentary on politics.
In 1969, while he was studying in England, he was recruited by a Jewish group to travel to the Soviet Union to interview Jews about their life there. When he returned the next year, he was in demand as a speaker on repression of Soviet Jews; he earned enough from lectures to travel, and visited around sixty countries.[2][6] He became the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.[7]
The start of Prager's career overlapped with a growing tendency among American Jews, who had been staunchly liberal, to move toward the center and some to the right, driven in part by the influx of Jews from the Soviet Union.[8] In 1975, Prager and Telushkin published an introduction to Judaism intended for nonobservant Jews: The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, which became a bestseller. Among the questions addressed in the text were: how does Judaism differ from Christianity, and can one doubt the existence of God and still be a good Jew, and how do you account for unethical but religious Jews?[1][9]
Prager ran the Brandeis-Bardin Institute from 1976 to 1983; Telushkin worked with him there.[1] It was Prager's first salaried job.[6] He soon earned a reputation as a moral critic attacking secularism and narcissism, both of which he said were destroying society; some people called him a Jewish Billy Graham.[6]
1980s
In 1982, KABC (AM) in Los Angeles hired Prager to host its Sunday night religious talk show Religion on the Line,[2] which got top ratings[10] and eventually led to a weekday talk show.[11][12] He and Telushkin published another book in 1983, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism.[1]
According to a review in Commentary, the book depicts antisemitism as a "sinister form of flattery"; the authors wrote that hatred of Jews arises from resentment over Jews' acceptance of the doctrine that they are God's chosen people, charged with bringing a moral message to the world.[13] The book describes Jews as both a nation (stateless for a long time) and followers of a religion and says that this identity is essential to Judaism; the book says that calls for Jews to culturally assimilate as well as opposition to Zionism are both forms of antisemitism.[13][14] The book describes secular Jews as people who have lost their way, and who generally fall into the error of applying Judaism's mission to reform the world in ways that tend to be leftist, totalitarian, and destructive.[13][14]
He also wrote a syndicated column for newspapers across the country. In 1985, Prager launched his own quarterly journal, Ultimate Issues,[2] which was renamed to The Prager Perspective[12] in 1996.[1]
In 1986, he divorced and underwent a year of therapy, which the Encyclopedia of Judaism says contributed to his 1999 book Happiness is a Serious Problem.[1] In 1990, he wrote an essay called "Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization" that argued against normalizing homosexuality in the Jewish community[15] and placed sexual sins on a continuum from premarital sex, celibacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, and incest; he argued that confining sex to heterosexual marriage desexualized religion, which was a great achievement of ancient Jewish tradition that was worth fighting to retain.[16]
1990s
By 1992, he was remarried.[15] By that time he was, according to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a "fixture on local radio" and "a Jewish St. George battling the forces of secularity on behalf of simple 'goodness'", and generally socially conservative, with some exceptions; he supported a woman's legal access to abortion (although he said it was usually immoral), and supported and justified sex between non-married consenting men and women.[15] In 1992, he became involved with the Stephen S. Wise Temple and gave talks there,[1] and got a weekday night talk show on KABC.[17]
In 1994, Prager also did an hour each weekday, via satellite on WABC, KABC's sister station in New York, before doing his KABC show locally.[18]
During the 1994–1995 television season, Multimedia Entertainment syndicated a television show featuring Prager.[19][20] Prager said he was "ambivalent about television as a medium for deep, intelligent programming" but that the show was "an incredible opportunity to reach a mass audience with my belief system".[21] In 1995, he moved the studio audience on-stage with him where they could interact with him more directly.[22]
In 1996, Prager testified in Congress in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act. Prager testified that "the acceptance of homosexuality as the equal of heterosexual marital love signifies the decline of Western civilization."[29][30] Prager worked with Bob Dole's campaign in the 1996 presidential election; when polls prior to the election showed that the Dole campaign did not have much Jewish support, Prager said this was because "American Jews are ignorant regarding the anti Israel aspects of the current Democrat Party."[31]
In 2009, Prager joined other Salem Radio Network hosts to oppose the Affordable Care Act.[36] In 2014, while same-sex marriage in the United States was in the process of being nationally legalized, he wrote that if that were to happen, then "there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry."[37][38] In 2014, he also said that the "heterosexual AIDS" crisis was something "entirely manufactured by the Left".[38]
Prager endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, but said that Trump was his "17th choice out of 17 candidates". He clarified that he "was not a Trump supporter, when there was a choice" but added, "There is no choice now."[39] Prager had previously said that Trump was "unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president".[40]Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic criticized Prager for endorsing Trump.[41]
In 2017, Prager was invited to be a guest conductor for the volunteer orchestra of Santa Monica, California, as part of a fundraising concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Some of the orchestra members protested the invitation, which they considered promoting bigotry. The orchestra leader, Guido Lamell, had invited Prager because he admired him, as Prager often discussed and promoted classical music on his shows and had guest-conducted a few times in the past, and because he thought Prager's presence might help raise more money.[38][37] Lamell called Prager "a great man, leader and friend".[42]
In February 2020, he told a caller: "Of course you should never call anybody the n-word, that's despicable," but complained about the word itself being considered unacceptable.[43][44] In April 2020, Prager called the COVID-19 lockdowns "the greatest mistake in the history of humanity."[45][46] He was subsequently criticized in the media for trivializing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.[47] In a 2020 video called "'Follow the Science' Is a LIE", Prager touted Sweden's response to COVID-19 and asserted, "Sweden is the proof that lockdowns are useless". A fact check in December 2020 found Prager's claim false, as Sweden had higher rates of COVID infection and mortality than other Scandinavian countries.[48] Since then Prager continues to criticize the lockdowns as unwarranted and destructive to society after findings from a commission set up by Sweden's parliament concluded that the government should have shut venues and taken other tougher measures early in the COVID-19 pandemic, though its no-lockdown strategy was broadly beneficial (dated February 25, 2022).[49]
In a November 2021 Newsmax interview, Prager argued that "irrational fears" about people not vaccinated against COVID-19 had wrongly made them "the pariahs of America as I have not seen in my lifetime", more than gay men and intravenous drug users during the AIDS crisis, who he inaccurately said had not been ostracized.[50][51]The Independent called his comments "alarming revisionism".[50] In the interview, Prager also called concerns about climate change "idiotic" and "irrational".[50]
In 2009, Prager and his producer Allen Estrin started a website called PragerU, which creates five-minute videos on various topics from a conservative perspective.[52][53][needs update]BuzzFeed News described PragerU as "one of the biggest, most influential and yet least understood forces in online media." As of 2018[update] it spent around 40% of its annual $10 million budget on marketing; each video is produced according to a consistent style. Videos cover topics such as "racism, sexism, income inequality, gun ownership, Islam, immigration, Israel, police brutality" and speech on college campuses. BuzzFeed News wrote that "the biggest reason PragerU has escaped national attention is that it mostly doesn't do Trump," or engage with the political news cycle.[40] Some of its videos had viewer access restricted by YouTube in 2017.[54]
In 2018, Prager published a commentary on the Book of Exodus; this was followed by another commentary on the Book of Genesis in 2019. Both were published by the Salem Media Group.[9]
^Stoll, Ira (November 1, 1996). "Donkeys Jockey for Credit As Clinton Victory Looms". The Forward.
^Piore, Adam (December 2005). "A Higher Frequency". Mother Jones. Archived from the original on October 29, 2020. Retrieved September 1, 2018.
^Stoltzfus, Mandy (May 8, 2006). "Conservative Spotlight: Chuck DeFeo". Human Events. Archived from the original on August 20, 2020. Retrieved September 4, 2018. "Our nationally syndicated hosts — Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt — reach millions of Americans every week. I come to work every day thinking about how we can move those folks online to Townhall.com so they can voice their opinion through blogging, pod-casting and interacting with other conservatives." DeFeo is excited about the opportunities he has using Townhall.com and Salem's radio to reach members of the conservative movement and involve them in policy battles and political campaigns.
^Christian, Sena (March 31, 2011). "Dennis Prager to speak locally". www.goldcountrymedia.com. Archived from the original on February 12, 2022. Retrieved February 12, 2022.