F E AT U R E S
DENNIS PRAGER A Conversation with an American Icon BY TRACEY ARMSTRONG GORSKY
JLIFE MAGAZINE WAS recently honored with the rare chance to interview Dennis Prager, a man who has lived a life so full it could easily rival the nine lives of a cat. Educator, lecturer, author, talk show host… the list goes on and on. To start, Prager is one of America’s most respected radio talk show hosts and has been broadcasting in LA since 1982. In 1999, his popular show became nationally syndicated and it continues to air live, five days a week. To-date he has appeared on “Fox and Friends,” “Red Eye,” “Hardball,” “Hannity,” “CBS Evening News,” “The Today Show” and many others. This may sound beyond uber-busy to you, but Dennis still finds a way to help out at the local level as well. He is set to appear at Temple Bat Yahm on October 18 for a much-anticipated evening of dialogue that’s sure to be a night to remember (please see details below). In the meantime, take a moment to get to know this wonderful man just a little bit better. How do you feel your Orthodox upbringing has influenced your adult life? Massively. Probably more than any one other thing. I am grateful every day that I attended yeshiva through high school rather than secular schools. In terms of practices, I left Orthodoxy the day after my Bar-Mitzvah, but I never stopped affirming the Jewish “trinity” of G-d, Torah, and Israel. I still subscribe to Maimonides’s Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith, believe in the Jews as G-d’s Chosen People, and the Torah as ultimately a divine book.
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Jlife
What inspired you to undertake each of your fields of study? My undergraduate majors were history and Middle Eastern Studies. If you don’t know history, you cannot possibly understand the present. And I wanted to understand the Arab and Muslim worlds, so, among other things, I studied Islam and Arabic. In graduate school I studied at both the Russian and Middle East Institutes of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. There I continued studying the Russian language and concentrated on Communism and Communist Affairs. In all these cases, I wanted to understand America’s and Israel’s enemies. And the communist studies helped me understand the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, Leftism. You are an educator, a writer and a talk show host. Do you feel that these three aspects of your career influence each other and if so in what ways? Being able to talk to millions of people for over 30 years has given me a laboratory for every idea I hold. What a unique gift. And, of course, it gave me a platform to try to educate many people. You recently wrote two books: “The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code”; and “The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Path To Follow” (for children). How did you approach this topic differently based on your audience?
The children’s version was my book simplified for young children. By age 11, or perhaps even earlier, young people should read the regular edition. Do you feel that children bring a different perspective to Jewish learning? Children bring a different perspective to all of life. But I am not among those who believe that children have a great deal to teach adults. How could they? They haven’t lived life long enough to accumulate the most important thing we are supposed to give children—wisdom. On the other hand, having and raising children teaches you more about life than almost any other experience. If so, what do you think are the best lessons we can learn from them? Children teach you about the human condition. Unless we decide to grow up— which many people in my generation have in fact decided not to do—we are all children. We have to leave the poor impulse control of childhood, the naiveté of childhood, the avoidance of responsibility of childhood, etc. Also, I learned more about society as a summer camp counselor than in all my years at college and graduate school. If you were to recommend one 5-minute video from your site Prager University to someone who has never visited the site, what would it be and why? Every one of the hundred or so videos is meant to be mind-,