Dennis Prager facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dennis Prager
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Prager in 2021
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| Born | August 2, 1948 New York City, U.S.
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| Alma mater | Brooklyn College (BA) |
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Dennis Mark Prager (/ˈpreɪɡər/; born August 2, 1948) 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. He gradually began offering more and broader commentary on politics.
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Early life and education
Dennis Prager was born in Brooklyn to Hilda Prager (née Friedfeld; 1919–2009) and her husband, Max Prager (1918–2014). Prager and his sibling Kenneth Prager, were raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish home. He attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York, where he befriended Joseph Telushkin. He went to Brooklyn College and graduated with a major in history and Middle Eastern Studies. Over the next few years he took courses at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and at the University of Leeds; he then left academia without finishing a graduate degree. After he left graduate school, Prager left Modern Orthodoxy but maintained many traditional Jewish practices; he remained religious. Prager holds an honorary Doctor of Laws from Pepperdine University.
Career
Beginnings
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. He became the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.
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. 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?
Prager ran the Brandeis-Bardin Institute from 1976 to 1983; Telushkin worked with him there. It was Prager's first salaried job. 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.
1980s
In 1982, KABC (AM) in Los Angeles hired Prager to host its Sunday night religious talk show Religion on the Line, which got top ratings and eventually led to a weekday talk show. He and Telushkin published another book in 1983, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism.
According to a review in Commentary, the book depicts anti-Semitism 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. 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. 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.
He also wrote a syndicated column for newspapers across the country. In 1985, Prager launched his own quarterly journal, Ultimate Issues, which was renamed to The Prager Perspective in 1996.
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. .....
1990s
By 1992, he was remarried. ..... In 1992, he became involved with the Stephen S. Wise Temple and gave talks there, and got a weekday night talk show on KABC.
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.
During the 1994–1995 television season, Multimedia Entertainment syndicated a television show featuring Prager. 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". In 1995, he moved the studio audience on-stage with him where they could interact with him more directly.
PragerU
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. 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. Some of its videos had viewer access restricted by YouTube in 2017.
Personal life
Prager speaks English, French, Russian and Hebrew. His brother, Kenneth Prager, is a physician and professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who advocates for vaccines and against hydroxychloroquine. His nephew, Joshua Prager, is a former writer for The Wall Street Journal.
Filmography
- For Goodness Sake, 1993
- For Goodness Sake II, 1996
- Baseball, Dennis, & the French, 2011
- No Safe Spaces, 2019
See also
In Spanish: Dennis Prager para niños
- Judaism and politics
- Jewish conservatism
