Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom - Dennis and Robert George: Are America's Founding Principles Still Relevant?

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Oct. 20, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show

01:52:50

Timeless Wisdom - Dennis and Robert George: Are America's Founding Principles Still Relevant?

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	Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
	Here, thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
	And to purchase Dennis Brigger's Rational Bibles.
	go to DennisPrager.com.
	Music Good evening and welcome.
	I'm Robert George.
	I have the honor to be the director of the James Madison Program of American Ideals and Institutions here at Princeton.
	And I'm uh delighted uh to have you here with us uh this evening for my conversation with Dennis uh Prager.
	Mr. Prager is a nationally syndicated radio host.
	He's been broadcasting uh in Los Angeles since 1982.
	His popular show became nationally syndicated in 1999 and airs live Monday through Friday, 9 to noon from his home station, which is KRLA.
	I know uh we can uh pick him up uh on the Philadelphia uh radio.
	Is it 970 or 990?
	990, yeah, good.
	Dennis co-founded Prager University, an institution of higher learning on the internet with a unique difference.
	All of the courses are five minutes in length.
	My students would love that.
	I don't want them to find out about this.
	That would be hard to compete with.
	Uh of course, what faculty uh are required to do is to distill the very best ideas of the best minds in the world, down to that five minutes.
	Uh and the topics cover everything from economics to history to philosophy to psychology.
	Uh Dennis is the author of a number of books, uh, including Still the Best Hope, subtitled Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph, which was published by Harper Collins in 2012.
	A book that's very relevant to our conversation this evening, Why the Jews.
	No question mark at the end.
	Why the Jews?
	With Joseph Telushkin, uh, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 2003.
	Happiness is a serious problem, uh, published by HarperCollins in uh 1998.
	Uh I'm sure many of you have, in addition to hearing Dennis on the radio, have uh uh uh read his books and also his columns uh in uh the newspapers around the country.
	He uh is with creators syndicate.
	Uh his writings have also appeared, appeared in the major uh newspapers and uh opinion magazines, uh commentary, uh, the weekly standard, the Wall Street Journal.
	Uh he's appeared on various uh television shows as well.
	He was educated at uh Brooklyn College uh as an undergraduate uh and then at the uh Columbia University.
	Uh he's taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College and Hebrew Bible verse by verse at American Jewish University.
	He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. delegation to the Vienna Conference, Vienna Review Conference on the Helsinki Record Accords, and he holds an honorary degree from Pepperdine University.
	please join me in welcoming to Princeton and the Madison program Dennis I should hold up uh still the best hoped.
	As you can see, it's available in an inexpensive uh paperback.
	Not here this evening, but you know where to go uh to find them.
	Dennis, welcome.
	It's such a delight to have you here.
	Well, you're a legend here, sir.
	You're a legend around the country.
	Here, drop here.
	I want to make that clear.
	You are a legend and deservedly so.
	So it's a joy.
	May I say something about my Philadelphia station?
	Because you mentioned it and you're wondering why would I mention it?
	You'll like this.
	So in Philadelphia about five years ago, there were very large audience.
	And uh I I began by saying I just want to thank WNTP, my local affiliate here in Philadelphia, AM980.
	And then, like now, many yelled out, but then there were about a thousand people.
	990.
	And I said, I'm Jewish.
	I can get it for you for 983.
	So every time I hear the Philadelphia station, that's what I remember.
	Well, our our our discussion this evening is entitled A Jewish Christian Dialogue, and you've already given away which of us is Jewish.
	So now the audience uh knows, although I recently learned, because my parents had the uh the uh genetic testing done that I'm actually six percent Jewish.
	Now, don't think that you're entitled to have me pay six percent temple fees at uh at the synagogue.
	But uh uh like our president here at Princeton, who recently found about uh found out about his own Jewish ancestry, I found out about uh mine.
	I'm six percent Presbyterian.
	I thought I'd mention that.
	You should fit in.
	Princeton very well.
	Well, since you brought up the subject, uh why don't we begin by uh having you share with the audience your thoughts about what it means to be Jewish?
	What does it mean to you to be Jewish?
	What does the what role does being Jewish play in your life and in your thinking?
	That's one of those questions that's very briefly asked.
	That's very hard to briefly answer, but I I will know that's very kind, but I I want your reactions, and that's as important to me as anything I have to say.
	Uh to me it is it uh it is clear.
	The uh to be a Jew is to be a member of the chosen people, not because we uh ever asked to be chosen.
	In fact, I agree with Tevia in the uh uh fiddler on the roof who prays to God, maybe you'll choose somebody else for a change.
	I have to say being chosen has not uh benefited us, uh if by benefit it means to be able to lead normal lives without being gassed uh and burned and the like uh throughout history.
	Uh there is a uh a prayer in the uh in the Haggadah, the the Jewish prayer book for the Passover Seder that says uh obviously translating from the Hebrew in every generation uh somebody arises to annihilate us, not uh not oppress us, annihilate us.
	The Hebrew is literally to put an end to us.
	As a child, I remember thinking that the rabbis were wrong.
	After the Holocaust, that's not going to happen again.
	It's not true every generation, that's exaggeration.
	And now there's Iran who announces we wish to annihilate the Jewish state.
	Israel is in the world what the Jew was in Europe.
	The individual to be exterminated.
	This is the nation to be exterminated.
	Anyway, uh so what does it mean to me?
	I'm a member of the chosen people.
	I didn't choose it.
	Uh a very quick anecdote.
	My my first radio show, I was the moderator of a very popular program on ABC Radio in Los Angeles.
	And we had a priest minister rabbi each week, not as a joke, a very real priest, minister and rabbi, different ones each week.
	One night, my the question arose from a listener or listener, people called in.
	And uh so the caller gave the rabbi a very hard time on Jewish chosenness.
	It's chauvinistic and racist.
	The rabbi was of a liberal bent, and it was clear to me that he agreed with all of them.
	But to his credit, he couldn't agree with him because he knew he represented Jewry and Judaism, not just his own views.
	So he was hemming and honing finally the Catholic priest, you will be proud to know.
	I go, please.
	He goes, caller, this is Father Michael Mosita, the Roman Catholic priest.
	God chose the Jews, get a life.
	It has always resonated with me because that's basically it.
	I I don't why he chose the Jews as his business.
	But it's clear.
	There's no other way to explain Jewish history.
	However, this is the point that is most important.
	Why were the Jews chosen?
	And the answer is to touch humanity by bringing the God of Sinai, the God of the Ten Commandments.
	My most recent book out three weeks ago explains the Ten Commandments.
	The God of the Ten Commandments to the world.
	And that's what we're here to do.
	But Jews aren't doing it.
	Jews haven't been doing it for two thousand years.
	I I always mention it's Christians who brought the Torah to the world.
	Not much more than Jews did.
	That's why I I always I often say to Jewish audiences, I say, if you only kept the Torah if you believe in the Torah as much as Christians did, the Mashiach would come.
	That's the Messiah in Hebrew.
	And for us it would be a first, for Christians a second, but it doesn't matter.
	It would still hasten the Messianic age.
	If Jews believed in the Torah as much as Christians did.
	I will end by saying, because I do want to cut it to the chase.
	The tragedy of Jewish life is that the Jews who talk to the world don't live Judaism, and the Jews who live Judaism don't talk to the world.
	And uh who are the Jews who talk to the world?
	You know, Betty Friedan and feminism, Noam Chomsky and Radicalism, uh, you know, half the ACLU, all the Jews on the left, the Jews at the New York Times, the Jews uh on on campuses.
	These are the Jews who talk to the world, but they're not bringing the world to Sinai.
	They crap on Sinai.
	They think it's it's it's drivel.
	Ten Commandments, what are you primitive?
	You believe in that stuff?
	You believe that that there's a divine book?
	I can't believe you you you you you speak English properly.
	That's so foolish.
	That's what most Jews believe.
	There are prominent rabbis who think that who advocate, and one of them is a dear friend whom I deeply respect.
	One of the most uh uh prominent rabbis in America tells Jews that the Exodus is a fable.
	And yet he knows, because he knows is Judaism.
	Judaism is built, Christianity is built on the crucifixion and resurrection.
	The Judaism is built on two events as well, creation and exodus.
	No exodus.
	I I don't want to be part of a fable.
	So this is the the crisis that uh that we're in, and I have devoted my life to telling Jews we we are a messenger who forgot his message, and that's our message.
	So uh what do you say to the idea that Judaism is for being Jewish is fundamentally a cultural and ethnic identity, uh perhaps one with links to uh uh love for the state of Israel, but not or needn't at least be a religious identity.
	What what about the Jew who just doesn't believe in God?
	Can he be Jewish?
	Yeah, well, my first book written when I was 25.
	I had a debate, you will get a kick out of this.
	I have a debate at 25.
	I I I was just finishing graduate school at may I say another school's name?
	All right, whisper.
	Columbia.
	And and uh I I so the question was, would I write my thesis or would I write this book on Judaism?
	And then I realized nobody will read my thesis.
	But a book on Judaism explaining it might be read.
	And it turned out my co-author and I, Joseph Tolushkin wrote a book which became the best-selling English introduction to Judaism for decades.
	The nine questions people ask about Judaism.
	The first question is, do you have to believe in God to be a good Jew?
	And the answer is no, you you do not have to believe in God.
	That is correct.
	You have to live a Jewish life, but you do not have to believe.
	Judaism does not disqualify you.
	You if you don't believe in Christ, you're not a Christian definitionally.
	But if you don't believe in God, it doesn't mean you're not a Jew.
	In fact, that would rule out many Jews, unfortunately.
	By the way, what I do tell Jews who are atheists or agnostics, you are commanded to struggle to believe.
	The word Israel means struggle with God.
	And everybody thinks it means believers have to struggle with God, which is true, we do.
	But non-believers have to struggle also with God.
	So uh the answer is no, you don't have to believe in God to be a good Jew.
	And to uh to be excuse me, to be a Jew.
	You could be a Jew and be a horrible human being.
	It's it just like an American.
	Does an American have to believe in America to be an American?
	No.
	Can America hate it, an American hate America and be an American?
	Yes.
	So now to the uh because we're a people and a religion, unlike Christianity, which is only a religion.
	Now, as to the uh other part, whenever a Jew says, Well, what about cultural Judaism?
	So, like a good Jew, I answered the question with a question.
	What do you mean?
	What is cultural Judaism?
	Have you seen a play in Yiddish recently?
	No, I don't know Yiddish.
	Okay.
	So what are you talking about?
	There is no such thing.
	Unless it's so trivial as to mean bagels, cream cheese, and locks.
	No, let me give you, let me take a shot at it.
	What would you say to the person who says, look, the essence for me of being Jewish is to live a moral life.
	And I don't think you need belief in God to sustain the basic moral teachings of Judaism.
	Now, of course, the person might say, I don't mean, oh, you know, the so-called primitive stuff.
	I mean being nice to people, doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you, uh, that kind of thing.
	That be just being an honest person, being a decent person, looking caring about other people, not just oneself.
	That's the essence of being Jewish.
	By the way, so do the prophets say that.
	Uh I I one of my favorite verses in the Bible is Micah uh 6'8.
	Yeah, 6'8.
	I only know four by heart.
	So don't get impressed.
	I put this one really is important to me.
	Uh, that in Genesis 1-1.
	Uh anyway, uh oh man, oh man, not just oh Jew, oh man, has God not told you all he wants to pursue justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
	But they forget to walk humbly with your God.
	Judaism does not believe that being good without God is possible.
	Sorry.
	That's why good without belief in God is possible.
	No, no, be you can be good without belief in God, but goodness, a good society will not be created without God.
	There are people who were good who believed in Zeus, people who were good who believed in Osiris, people who were good who believe in voodoo.
	There were good voodooists.
	There are ethical people of every stripe and ethical atheists.
	But Judaism is not atheism.
	Judaism has a trinity just almost just like almost Christianity.
	And that is God Torah Israel.
	And if you get rid of God, you will get rid of the ethics in the final analysis.
	That's what happens in real life.
	So would you say then to the person who proposes cultural Judaism as the ethical teaching without the theology that they are living on a depleting base of capital?
	Yes.
	What uh was called I Wish by Me, but I popularized cut flower ethics.
	You can take flowers from their soil, you cut them, and someone who knows nothing about plants will say, Look, these plants are flourishing.
	They don't need their soil, but they will wither and die.
	The soil of Judaism is religious soil.
	The soil of Western civilization is religious soil.
	The soil of America is religious soil.
	And we see what is happening.
	The New York Times published a piece, I don't know if you happened to catch it two months ago, by a professor of philosophy, who's obviously secular.
	And I actually read it twice to make sure that the Times knew what they were publishing.
	He wrote to his shock, there's an entire generation of Americans who don't believe in moral truth.
	That's his term.
	They don't believe, and I have been yelling this for my lifetime.
	I meet Jewish students who say the following: I think the Nazis were wrong, but the Nazis thought they were right.
	So who's to know?
	And they're right.
	All morality is a matter of opinion.
	So that is the consequence that we are living with with the death of this soil that nurtured Judaism and nurtures ethics.
	Let me ask you about being Jewish in America, being Jewish and uh American.
	Um of the very first things I ever heard the man who would become my father-in-law say when I was just a boyfriend at a uh at a satyr table, when asked by another guest whether he had ever considered making aliyah, ever considered moving permanently to Israel.
	My father-in-law said, who is a World War II veteran captured at the bulge, very patriotic American, said, why should I move to Israel?
	The United States of America is the promised land.
	Well, it's not the promised land.
	It's just the greatest country ever developed.
	But it's not the promised land.
	That's true.
	So he what he said was hyperbole.
	Jews, however, have regarded it as listen, the the greatest rabbi of the 20th century was an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, the Lababacher Rabbi.
	No, no, no, no, the Lababacher Rebbe, the Rebbe.
	The Chabad.
	Menachem Schneerson.
	And he said, this is a golden Amedina.
	This is a golden country.
	I mean, he said it would no, no, excuse me.
	He's better.
	He said, Medinash el Chesed.
	This is a country of kindness, of goodness.
	Khesed is the highest appellation in many ways in Judaism.
	And that's what he said about America.
	That's why he told his ultra-Orthodox followers, you you have to observe Thanksgiving.
	Because a lot of the secular holiday Thanksgiving.
	Yes.
	Well, or even as a religious holiday.
	You're thanking God for this country.
	And this is an ultra orthodox.
	I say that because I grew up Orthodox, and they a lot of the Orthodox didn't celebrate Thanksgiving.
	That was for the Goyim.
	Goyim is, by the way, not pejorative.
	It's just means the nations.
	Israel is called a goy when God says be a goi kadosh, be a holy nation in Leviticus 19.
	But he was wrong on the promised land, your future father-in-law.
	But he was right about how great this is for everybody, including us Jews.
	He says that it's the safest and happiest place Jews have ever lived, including in Israel.
	It's the only, well, I don't know if it's the happiest.
	I don't know if America's happier for a Jew than Israel.
	I I don't know.
	That's a tough call.
	I I always find the happiness measurements index, you know, Danes are the happiest people.
	I that's the latest that's come out of this.
	Yeah.
	Have you been to Denmark?
	I've been to 112 countries.
	Denmark was the most boring that I ever.
	I have nothing against Danes, nothing whatsoever.
	But it's not exciting.
	Oh, look, an exciting Dane.
	If you meet an exciting Dane, it's because he's become an American.
	Just just so you'll know that.
	Okay?
	I always love that.
	For the left, if you have no passion, you're happy.
	Americans have passions, and it's a good thing.
	I I obviously I love being American.
	But I wouldn't say Americans, Jews are happier than Israeli Jews.
	It's an uh difficult thing to judge.
	Uh safety is a very tough issue given the fact that Israel is as big as New Jersey as this state, and there are people who wish to annihilate it.
	That's a very serious matter, obviously.
	How how do you account, Dennis, for the generally overwhelmingly positive attitude of non-Jewish, mostly Christian Americans toward Jews and indeed toward Israel by comparison with the situation in many European countries, which, unlike America, are highly secularized.
	How does that make sense?
	Wasn't secularization supposed to be an advantage to the Jewish populations because it would make it safer for the Jews.
	You know, my next speech to a Jewish group I'm giving you.
	You should give the speech.
	Bring it on.
	We uh we truly are at least thus far, we are truly and I know you, and I know your writing.
	We have very similar views on so on virtually everything.
	Uh first of all, I tell Jews all the time, you you're so in love with secularism, then why is secular Europe so bad for Jews?
	I say that to Jews all the time.
	But the bigger answer to your question is why is America different?
	Because America's Christians are different.
	And most Jews don't know this, and most Christians don't know this.
	That's the sad part.
	America's Christians have been different since before 1776.
	But the biggest difference between America's Christians, and this is a very interesting thing, especially, well, not especially.
	I was going to say especially for Catholics, but it's really just as much for Protestants.
	But the uh the great difference is that America's Christians were Judeo-Christians.
	Self-consciously Judeo.
	No, nobody, yes, Margaret Thatcher said Judeo-Christian civilization, because she really believed in it.
	But she was an outlier In Europe.
	Nobody said that Germany was Judeo-Christian.
	And I'm talking before the Holocaust.
	Nobody said France was Judeo-Christian.
	America is Judeo-Christian because the Christians who founded it were the most Judeo-based Christians who ever existed.
	This was to be the second chosen people, Americans, not the first.
	The first are the Jews.
	We're second.
	We are.
	This was the opposite of replacement theology, which is which is powerful in Protestantism and was powerful in Catholicism.
	Where you read uh Israel as the church.
	They didn't read Israel as the church, the American Christians.
	They read Israel as Israel.
	And the only verse on the Liberty Bell is from the Torah.
	That Jews don't know that, and Christians don't know that.
	But the Christians who founded America, you couldn't get a B.A. in almost any American university till 1800 if you didn't study Hebrew.
	This is a Judeo-Christian country because these were Judeo-Christian founders.
	In fact, James Madison remained at Princeton.
	He became our first graduate student.
	He remained at Princeton even after completing his undergraduate degree to do what?
	To study Hebrew with John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.
	Lincoln, of course, who venerated the founders, referred to the United States as an almost chosen people.
	Yeah.
	This is – and how's this for depression-inducing?
	America's Jew, American Jews are trying to secularize the one Judeo-Christian country.
	Because I am a member of a largely stupid people.
	Chosen but stupid.
	I'm sorry, I could cry saying this.
	There's no joy.
	God gave Jews brains.
	There's no question Jews have brains.
	You can't deny it.
	It's absurd to deny it.
	But doesn't mean Jews have any wisdom.
	The difference between brilliant and wise is like the difference between night and day.
	It has nothing to do with one another.
	Taxi drivers have more wisdom than most professors.
	Not all, obviously.
	Someone who has become my very dear friend over the past several years, um, someone with whom I've worked and collaborated, uh, is a Jew who both lives as Judaism and who speaks to the world.
	It's Chief Rabbi Emeritus Jonathan Sachs of Britain.
	Have you ever both uh scholars in residents for Chabad uh in Canada?
	Uh two uh two or three Passovers ago.
	My wife and son were there.
	Uh we had a great time, and uh we obviously uh enjoyed each other's presence.
	Uh I'm a bit more outspoken in my uh feeling that leftism is the most dynamic religion in the world of the last hundred years and needs to be fought and crushed, uh, or we are doomed.
	Uh he wouldn't say that.
	He probably believes it, but I don't think he would say it.
	Um is his brand of Orthodox Judaism uh idiosyncratic, or is this what we can expect from modern Orthodox Judaism today?
	Well, he observes like other modern Orthodox Jews.
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	He's about his willingness to engage the larger that is that that is idi more idiosyncratic.
	I grew up Orthodox.
	I went to Yeshiva till I was 18.
	Uh I stopped being orthodox shortly after my bar mitzvah, but I uh remained religious.
	I am one of the four or five Jews on earth who is not orthodox and believes the Torah is from God.
	I'm idiosyncratic, not uh uh Rabbi Sachs.
	Uh uh but he is the idiosyncratic in engaging the world.
	Uh by and large, orthodoxy has been uh cloistered.
	That cloistered uh uh element was what troubled me the most.
	Uh I I was you don't perceive it changing?
	It's in the younger generation of modern Orthodox.
	During Q is there going to be QA?
	Yeah.
	I will ask, actually, if I may, and put him on the spot.
	My son, who is unlike me, he is Orthodox and he's here.
	I'll ask him to comment if his generation is I know he is profoundly engaged and utterly comfortable with the non-Jewish larger world.
	Uh I'll he'll have to answer for his peers.
	I think they're more comfortable, whether engaged and think that we have something to say to them.
	I don't know if that's changed much.
	I think in that regard, I do think Rabbi Sachs is idiosyncratic.
	There is so much wisdom in the tradition that someone like Rabbi Sachs can bring to bear, not just for his fellow Jews, but for the broader uh community, Christians and others, that uh it would be a shame if he's simply idiosyncratic and doesn't represent an opening of Orthodox Judaism to the uh of course it is yes, you're right, it is a shame.
	Listen, uh when when I don't know how many of you know about Chabad, but it is this ultra-Orthodox group, they open houses all over America and the world.
	There's one here and wonderful one here on the campus.
	I have the privilege of speaking to some of the Jewish students at the Chabad house here last night.
	Uh they they are regarded with great suspicion by other ultra-Orthodox Jews for moving to places where there's no real religious Jewish community.
	What's wrong with you?
	You're gonna go to a place like you know, Juneau, Alaska, and you're gonna open up a religious house there when when you you know you can't even barely find a quorum for a Sabbath minion, you know, a Sabbath service.
	Uh so that they don't they don't think that way.
	It's you know, the ultra-Orthodox who work in the diamond industry charter a bus uh to go home back to Borough Park or to uh to Muncy or Square Town so that they don't have to engage the larger world and they could study uh the psalms in the bus and not have to sit near women.
	Uh so it's a cloistered world.
	I I I have a lot of respect for a lot of these people.
	They are keeping the religion alive in many ways, but I don't think that but that argument that X group X keeps something alive doesn't persuade me as much as it does others.
	Uh I s the Orthodox, by the way, who are the most open-minded of the Jews.
	Uh reformed Jews would never have me at their convention speak on why I am not liberal.
	Uh but Orthodox Jews had me at their convention speak on why I'm not orthodox, which is astonishing.
	Why are you not orthodox?
	My son could explain to you to his great chagrin.
	Why am I not in a nutshell?
	I believe that the oral law, Judaism is consists of written law, the Torah law, and oral law, which is you'll find in the Mishnah, which is part of the Talmud.
	I believe that the reason it was kept oral was so that it changes.
	Uh look, I I can give you 20 examples of laws that you would say you can't, I can't believe people still observe.
	I have great respect for people who observe it.
	They're my ideological allies for all as it happens.
	That's where I that's where they are.
	They understand the dangers of secularism.
	But the practices, I'm too rational.
	It's a blessing and a curse to be rational.
	And I and So you don't believe the law, those particular laws are binding.
	Right, that's exactly right.
	I don't believe they're binding.
	I I give you one example that none of you, if you're if you're Christian or if you're not Jewish, know of.
	The Torah says that you shall observe the Passover for seven days.
	Seven days you shall eat matzah and not eat any leavened food.
	I observe that.
	I observe most Torah laws.
	The Torah laws I don't observe, it's because I'm lazy, not because I don't believe they should be observed.
	I'm a sinner, but I believe they should be observed.
	But I observe of course I observe that.
	And I by the way, I don't, and it says on the first and last day you shall do no work, and indeed I take off from work.
	I don't broadcast, I don't do anything.
	I I vegetate and have a great time, uh you know, with friends, family, or just my wife.
	And uh it's it's a wonderful thing.
	Uh but what do the Orthodox do?
	The Orthodox have added a day, an eighth day outside of Israel.
	In Israel, the ultra or the Orthodox observe seven days, as the Torah says.
	Outside of Israel, they've added a day.
	Why did they add a day?
	Because they argued in the beginning, we really don't know which day is the holiday, so we'll add a day.
	But I could give you 20 reasons why that doesn't make any sense, and why do you keep it now that we do know exactly when it is?
	And there's no double day for for Yom Kippur.
	So how did they know they were fasting on the holest day of the year, Yom Kippur?
	All I'm saying is this should have changed.
	It should it's it doesn't make sense today.
	I and I'm told I I'm told by Orthodox Jews that I raise this too, because this is my favorite one to raise when when the Orthodox Jews who really like me, because I'm I'm the one of the only voices out there in the public fighting for the Torah.
	So they know, you know, Prager, he's our idiosyncratic, half-crazed but good guy.
	They they know I'm a good guy, and but they it's so like Dennis, why aren't you from why aren't you Orthodox?
	Like so in in I you want to I'll give you a I'll give you a uh uh a two-word answer, Yom Toshani.
	Adding an extra day on the holidays.
	See, here's the killer.
	God wants us to observe seven days for Passover because Passover is a recreation of the world.
	Seven is important.
	When they add an eighth day, it kills the Torah's meaning.
	So it's not that I I'm lazy and don't want to do an eighth day.
	It's that I think they're wrong.
	It's not comfort, it's ideological opposition.
	And by the way, a very prominent Orthodox Jews, very young, and I won't say his name, because I don't think that he'd want this known, but I'll ask him if I can.
	He said, Dennis, and he's very strict in observance.
	We went out for lunch and all he had was salad.
	He wouldn't eat off in a hot food off a off a non-kosher dish.
	And uh he said, I said, Dennis, I agree with you in everything you say about orthodoxy.
	I'm Orthodox because I think it's the only way we're going to keep Judaism alive.
	Let's turn to uh to my side of the street and talk about Christianity a little bit.
	A very large percentage of your uh audience is Christian, not just in the kind of cultural sense, but devout Protestants, uh Catholics, uh others.
	Uh what is your read now, your impression of the state, the impression of a sympathetic outsider of the state of Christianity today, beginning in the United States and then perhaps more broadly.
	What how do you perceive the situation for Christianity right now in our culture?
	I'm worried uh about it, actually.
	I don't say this on the air.
	I will.
	It's not something I wouldn't, I just haven't yet.
	I'm worried about the the saving grace in America, and I know that they're a terrific Catholics.
	I mean, uh you're one of them.
	I mean, I mean, I know that.
	I work with them, I I adore them, but the real, as a movement, evangelical Christians in America are going to either save the United States or if they weaken, I don't know, may I in Yavoazri where our salvation will come from.
	And I don't mean salvation in the eschatological sense.
	I mean it right now.
	How are we going to be saved?
	It's either evangelical Christians or I think we're doomed.
	And I see I said something, and I I I don't know, I don't want to be too political, but this isn't even meant politically.
	It's meant morally and in every other way.
	The dominant religion of the world, the most dynamic religion of the world of the last hundred years is leftism.
	It's i not Christianity, not Islam, and obviously not Judaism.
	So this is infiltrating to the best of my knowledge, it's infiltrating Catholicism, it's already infiltrated that.
	I mean, on social outside of gay marriage or same-sex marriages, it should properly be called, and abortion, and contraception.
	The bishops are overwhelmingly liberal in their in their economic views, for example.
	There's a hostility to capitalism that goes from Rome to Baltimore.
	The current Pope uh is a man of Latin America.
	Latin America is, you know, its theology is Christian, but it's its ideology is leftism.
	Uh he's going to put out an encyclical on global warming.
	Christian communities are being annihilated, and the great issue for the Pope this year, the Pope, is global warming, is climate change.
	I mean people understand the gravity of that decision.
	It breaks my heart.
	And then the same thing, or or it's it's happening more slowly, but it's happening among evangelicals.
	The replacement theology and the Jews are always the litmus test.
	It just works out that way.
	Watch how a group looks at the Jews or Israel, and you could pretty well know where, when or whether their moral compass is broken.
	And a replacement theology or displacement theology is is having uh its uh uh resurrection, if you will, I hate to use the term among among uh evangelicals.
	Uh the once environmentalism becomes well, Good evening and welcome.
	Good evening and welcome.
	I know we have lost it.
	Frankly, on my list of worries for humanity that the world will be uh deluged in 50 years is so low on my list.
	We can handle global warming.
	Okay, if it happens, I'm not denying it's happening.
	It doesn't bother me.
	Bothers me is evil now.
	I am infinitely more worried about Israel having nuclear weapons dropped on it than I am about oceans rising 50 years from now uh at sea coasts.
	As I have said often, you have a choice on your tombstone.
	Here lie so-and-so, he fought evil, here lie so-and-so, he fought carbon emissions.
	You choose which tombstone you would like to have.
	I want the former.
	Now uh it has to be said, though, that those Christian uh churches, Protestant or Catholic, that are growing and flourishing, are the more conservative and morally demanding ones.
	Those that have gone the more liberal route, perhaps in order to be more inclusive, have found fewer people want to actually be included, fewer people want to to come.
	Do you not take that as a as a as a good sign?
	While at the same time recognizing that secularism has made its significant inroads into both Catholic and Protestant traditions.
	It is a good sign.
	And it makes makes sense.
	Why?
	If my primary concerns are same-sex marriage, global warming, increased, increasing the size of government, a single-payer system for health care.
	Why do I need to go to church or shul, what's what Jews call synagogue?
	I could go to the local Democratic Party, and that's where I'll I'll do it.
	I don't need Judaism or Christianity.
	But if you want to believe that God spoke.
	And by the way, I am convinced that is the defining issue.
	It's not whether people believe in God or not.
	It's whether people believe in a divine text or not.
	That's the division in America.
	A lot of people who ideologically opposed to believe in God.
	It means nothing to me.
	I want to know where what did God ever speak?
	And if so, where is it written?
	And the people who believe in a divine text, Jew or Christian, they have different views on almost everything than the people who believe that it's all man-made.
	So that's the reason that people that those churches are growing.
	What do you get if you go to uh with all respect, there are wonderful people in you know uh the Presbyterian Church USA, which passed you know its resolution against Israel, and which by the way, all the Presbyterians who call my show are disgusted with.
	And many of them are leaving the Presbyterian church, which already has so many people leaving.
	Uh I I think I I'll tell you, if it uh, you know, it's funny for an outsider to say, but we're in America was so uh we're so uh familiar and comfortable with each other, we can talk like this.
	And so I'll tell you the day that uh it won't happen, but uh not in my lifetime.
	But the if it should, if a large movement of cardinals started supporting ordaining women as priests, I think you could you could pretty much count that time as the beginning of the demise of the Catholic Church.
	You have to stand for for something and and not ask what will the New York Times editorial page think of me.
	Here's a rule for all politicians that I on my side.
	If the New York Times editorial page writes positively about you, it is a very bad sign.
	I think it's uh it was actually uh my colleague here at Princeton and our sociology department, Robin Robert Wetnow, who first pointed out, at least in my hearing, that uh there does seem to be a rather dramatic change in American uh culture and politics pertaining to religion in the past 50 years,
	and that is that divisions between the different faiths, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, used to have at least sometimes some political salience that people identified in a politically salient way with their tradition and with people within the tradition,
	but today, and really for the past 40 or 50 years, there seems to be a division across the traditions where the more traditional Catholics, more traditional Protestants, more traditional Jews, feel a kinship with each other and are politically allied with each other, and of course, the more liberal Protestants, more liberal Catholics, more liberal Jews feel a kinship with each other, and a kind of animosity toward the people on the other side of the spectrum.
	That's a major change if he's right.
	It's a major change in history.
	You do not have a Jewish Christian divide.
	you have a conservative-liberal divide, to use just parlance that will work.
	But absolutely, I remember this was the great revelation to me being the moderator of this show.
	This This was the greatest gift from God.
	I got to do this for ten years, talk to representatives of every faith on earth except Jehovah's Witness.
	They were the only ones who didn't come.
	Everybody I had everybody.
	I had Jews for Jesus, I I had uh Buddhists, I had uh Muslims, I had everybody.
	And I really learned.
	And I realized by about year four, and I was in my 30s, this was all revelatory to me.
	I went to Yeshiva.
	I thought Jews and Christians were very different.
	And I realized, hey, wait a minute.
	I keep siding with the Christian who is who is traditional, and against the rabbi who isn't.
	And so I it became so personal.
	I realized I have much more in common with this priest or this minister than I do with this rabbi.
	Sometimes, of course, I have more in common with the rabbi, but it it all depended on that.
	That is the division today, as you just enunciated it.
	Ready for a curveball?
	I love curved balls.
	It's a curveball.
	Christians have to have a theology of Judaism.
	There's no way around it.
	That's right.
	Christians need some account of the Jewish faith.
	Now, one account historically, as you pointed out, that has been powerful in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, although now formally and officially and decisively repudiated by Catholicism is the idea of replacement theology.
	Protestants are still fighting about it, but it's been repudiated by Catholicism, and most recently that repudiation was reaffirmed by Pope Francis and his encyclical on uh the joy of the gospel.
	Now, by replacement theology, we mean the idea that once Christ comes, the covenant between God and the Jewish people is of no significance any longer.
	It's over.
	The church completely replaces Judaism.
	It's the it's the new Israel in a sense that renders Judaism itself as sort of no longer relevant.
	The anti-replacement theological position, the position of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and now again Pope Francis, is that the covenant between God and the Jewish people is unbroken and indeed unbreakable.
	All right, so there's that.
	The Christians have to have a theology of Judaism, whether it's replacement theology or something else, there's no way around it.
	Do Jews have to have a theology of Christianity, a theological understanding of Christianity, and whether they have to or not, do you have one?
	Is how do you theologically, if you think about it at all, account for the Christian witness that has, as you pointed out, brought the Torah to the world.
	How should a Jew think of Christianity theologically?
	Right.
	I think about this a lot.
	I thought I was going to catch you by surprise.
	No, this was a actually a high fastball.
	But the truth is, though, I'm not saying this in in the slightest as to make me look good.
	Most Jews wouldn't have an answer because to answer part one, they don't need to have an answer.
	Judaism exists and it pre-exists Christianity.
	And it continues to exist, and the covenant continues to exist.
	So a Jew doesn't need for his theology, he doesn't need a theology of Christianity.
	But if you care about if you believe we have a mission to bring the world to the God of the Ten Commandments, the God of the Torah, then you better damn well have a theology of Christianity.
	And I do.
	My theology of Christianity is that it is or best can be, because sometimes it hasn't been.
	True.
	It can be and often is a divine way of bringing humanity to the God of the Torah.
	That's how I, as a Jew, regard Christianity.
	I get calls, and some of you may have heard this who listened to my show.
	I will get a call.
	Dennis, you know, it's really funny, but I just want you to know, and I want to thank you for this for a long time.
	I finally got through.
	I'm back at my Catholic church, or I'm back at my Baptist church because of you.
	Listening to you make the case for God and religion here.
	You convinced me, man, but you know, my friends will say to me, hey Harry, how come you're back at church?
	And I tell them, well, a Jew sent me.
	And he cracks himself up when he says it, you know, and I don't crack up, and I'm I'm the happiest guy in the world.
	And then Christians ask me, how could you be happy?
	Because they know I'm not faking it.
	For a Christian, this is the curveball to Christians.
	And I know why it's a curveball.
	Dennis, you sound genuinely happy when somebody goes back to church.
	Don't you believe in religious truth?
	This is really the bottom line for Christians in their the it's a Christians have like me a lot, or at least conservative Christians.
	And I love them.
	I I adore them.
	Okay.
	So it's a mutual love that we have.
	But there are still puzzles.
	This is one of them.
	If a Christian were responsible for sending somebody to a synagogue, I don't know if they would be as happy.
	They wouldn't believe they wouldn't cry, but they wouldn't be as happy as I am that this guy went back to his church.
	Because for us Jews, of course I believe Judaism is true.
	But that doesn't mean that everything you believe isn't.
	Judaism doesn't judge others by theology, it judge us judges others by behavior.
	If you produce God fearing, and I mean by God, the God of Genesis, the God of the Exodus, the God of the Ten Commandments, the God of the Torah, if you produce Torah God fearing citizens, you're true.
	That's it.
	That's for me, that's true.
	And where Jews fail to produce that, that's false.
	And that's that's pretty that's pretty good Jewish stuff.
	There's no rabbi who's ever, no ultra-orthodox rabbi who and they they know me pretty well, who's ever said they disagree with me on my objections to orthodoxy, but they don't disagree with me on my on my joy that a Christian went back to church.
	I can tell you from my own experience, and I've had many Jewish students from secular backgrounds tell me that they've rediscovered their Jewish faith.
	We're nodding our heads as a result of uh uh working with me, and I feel the same joy.
	I feel the same joy.
	So I'll throw you a curveball.
	Don't you believe in the truth of Christianity?
	Oh, I do, yeah.
	So why wouldn't you be happier if he went to church?
	Because God's covenant with the Jewish people is unbroken and unbreakable.
	Now, if he decides to go to church.
	Right.
	That too, I believe there's even a fuller realization of truth in it.
	That's implicit in, of course, the Christian degree.
	And I can live with that.
	Jews, Jews ask me all the time, Dennis, the Jews on the left go crazy from me.
	They go crazy.
	I they I that's the reason I write for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, because they it's edited and read by liberal Jews.
	So the joy I get publishing in that journal.
	I'm gonna live till 120 just on that joy.
	I don't know if I should be smiling because I'm supposed to be opposed to torture.
	It's a benign torture.
	I happen to think it should be pleasurable.
	It's self-inflicted torture.
	So, but I just want to tell you, they say to me, Dennis, how can you love these Christians so much?
	You're being what's wrong with you?
	They think you're going to hell.
	They think all Christians think I'm going to hell.
	By the way, many do.
	Many of the people who most love me really worry for my soul.
	And by the way, not by the way, and so let me respond what I feel and what I what I how I regard that.
	I say to these Jews, I say, which by the way, I have found in 33 years of radio, is about as potent a response as one can have.
	I will then say, so what?
	And then my favorite moments as a radio talk show host is when there is silence on the line.
	Because it is the most pregnant silence you can have, and they don't have an answer.
	So, yes, okay, so they think that if I don't accept Christ, I cannot be saved.
	So what?
	And then while there's silence, I say, so let me explain.
	I don't judge people by their theology.
	And Judaism taught me not to judge people by their theology, but to God judges people by their behavior.
	That's why we believe that you do use works to get into heaven.
	So I assume that as a Jew, you believe works are what God cares about, not not theology.
	So why are you angry at these people?
	These are the Jews' best friends in the world today.
	At the uh the very final sentence, as I recall of uh Pope John Paul's encyclical Veritatus Splendor on the splendor of truth, uh, is that it is on the path of the moral life that salvation is available even to those who have not received the gospel.
	It's a very similar view of.
	Who's whose was this?
	John Paul II.
	Veritatus Splendor, the splendor of truth.
	Well, it would have been look, I'm thrilled, but between us, I would uh I'm not saying I'm not complaining.
	Well, I am.
	I I wish a similar bull or encyclical had been issued in you know in the 1500s or 1300s.
	Yeah, we all do.
	Yeah, yeah, we all do.
	Um what do you think the key differences were that were made by Judaism's gift, if I can call it that, of monotheism to the world, of ethical monotheism to the world.
	What difference did it make that ethical monotheism was introduced to the world ethically and politically?
	Well, for one thing, it said ever there is one God for everyone.
	Judaism introduced religious intolerance.
	Just want to make that clear.
	Pagans were far more religiously tolerant than the Jews.
	You had your gods for your city, we have to do that.
	That's right.
	You have your gods, we have our gods.
	It's it's it's the New York Times would have flourished.
	They would have loved that.
	That's great.
	The Mesopotamians have theirs, the Egyptians have theirs, they don't bug us, we don't bug them.
	They do bug each other, but that's not a good thing.
	Well, but not by but not by yes, not in theologically.
	But then the Jews come and say, excuse me, all your gods are false.
	Hello.
	Everything you worship is drivel, and then we wonder why we're hated.
	Jews did not write how to win friends and influence people.
	Well, we did write how to influence people, but not how to win friends.
	Uh so that's the first thing.
	We there's a God for everyone, therefore, there's one morality.
	One God is one morality.
	It's ethical monotheism.
	And all of humanity will be judged by the same standard.
	Mesopotamians and Jews and Mesoamericans, you're all going to be judged by this.
	This was the great revolution.
	And then the Ten Commandments, uh, I mean, there are many great revolutions to it.
	It's uh Judaism introduced the idea of progress in history.
	History isn't a cycle, that you just returned to doing what you did, like the American Indian, basically repeated what was done before and what was done before and what was done before.
	Uh life is not a circle, life is a forward line.
	So this was Henry Bamford Parks taught me this uh in his book on the medieval world.
	You're not supposed to say it.
	Uh it's politically incorrect to say it.
	But it seems to me that a very important contribution of Jewish ethical monotheism was to introduce a rigorous and high and demanding standard of sexual morality and the concept of the integrity and Americans have a big health care problem.
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	...of the marital bond and to apply it to men as well as to women.
	Do you agree with that?
	I oh I would agree with that.
	That's why do not commit adulteries in the Ten Commandments, although to be intellectually honest.
	It's as it became understood more fully.
	It was originally only with regard to married women.
	So a single man committed could commit adultery, or as a single woman couldn't, but uh similarly a married man with a single woman was not necessary because they believe that because polygamy was possible.
	So he could but but essentially that is exactly right.
	Having said that, um I will say that one of the handful of differences, because I always talk about Judeo-Christian values, because they exist.
	That's what they are.
	But uh are there any areas even within the values forgetting theology that there is a Jewish Christian difference?
	And I could really find only really two.
	You'll find this interesting.
	Divorce, I'm assuming.
	Correct.
	Divorce is what's the other?
	Lust.
	Lust?
	Yes.
	Who's for it and who's against it.
	Take a guess.
	I got it.
	I got it.
	So my all-time favorite anecdote from ten years of being the moderator of that show.
	I I picked the subject every week for the rabbi priest and minister.
	As I said, they were different ones each week.
	One week, I decide, I said, okay, I'm gonna clergy, I would meet them five minutes before the show.
	Clergy, tonight's topic is what is your religion's attitude towards lust.
	Okay.
	Now, as it happens, it was not common, but the rabbi that night was an ultra-orthodox bearded East European rabbi, classic uh stereotypical East European rabbi with the with the uh black hat or at least black gamulka and uh and uh a Yiddish accent, east East European accent.
	Now I every night I would begin, I because of demography, I'd begin the Protestant to the Catholic to the Jew, and that's what I did that night.
	So okay, your attitude.
	So of course they they the they all spoke beautifully.
	The Protestant spoke, quoting Matthew, of course, whoever lost for another woman has committed adultery in his heart, and uh how important it is to have pure thoughts and so on.
	The Catholic said essentially the same thing in other beautiful words, and uh then it was turned for the rabbi.
	And I had no idea what he was would say, given he was ultra-orthodox, and I go, Rabbi, what is your and Judaism's position on lust.
	It's a little silence, and then he goes, Dennis, lost, shmust.
	All right.
	I was never so proud to be a Jew.
	Now now, which is the missionary religion?
	It sounds like you've got a message that would sell better than this.
	The truth is Judaism is preoccupied with the inviolability of marriage, just as you described, and introduced it, in fact.
	And indeed, introduced on the most difficult of issues of our time, introduced the idea that men should confine their sexual behavior to women.
	Because in all societies in the Middle East and around the world, men had women for babies and men for sex.
	This is unknown today.
	We think it's only Greece.
	It was everywhere, everywhere.
	Judaism, the Torah introduced marital sexual joy.
	Your wife is not just to make a baby.
	Your wife is for sexual intercourse as as as a joy, as a part of life.
	Forget boys, no more boys, Jewish men, no more.
	That was big.
	That was big.
	It's Genesis 2, for the man shall leave his mother and home and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.
	Yes.
	By the way, the part of leaving your parents home, that's really revolutionary today.
	Forget cleaving to his wife.
	Just get him the hell out of the house is hard.
	You never know the relevance of a biblical passage.
	You and I have both over many years, although neither of us is a Protestant, uh, have uh worked very closely and developed strong, powerful friendships uh with many evangelical uh Protestants and worked with them on cultural and political uh issues.
	Um never, I must say, uh in my time in um working with and and being friends with evangelicals, have I ever had an evangelical tell me that his strong support for the State of Israel for the right of Israel to exist,
	or for the Jewish people, is because he supposes that the flourishing of Israel is necessary to hasten the coming of the Messiah, and yet when I talk to my liberal colleagues, their explanation of strong evangelical Christian support for Israel in this country is that these evangelicals allegedly believe that well, that's necessary in their theology for the coming of the Messiah.
	What do you hear from your evangelical friends about this?
	What you just said is so important.
	And so let me say what I am about to say do not hold the Madison Society responsible, do not hold Professor George responsible.
	It won't work, Dennis.
	I'm gonna get it anyway.
	So go ahead.
	I'm used to it.
	The world of the left is built on falsehoods, which are repeated so often that they actually believe what they say.
	There is no better example than that.
	They say, Jews and non-Jews on the left.
	The only reason evangelicals support Israel is because they believe that the Jews have to gather in Israel.
	This will bring the second coming and the apocalypse, and that's what they're rooting for.
	I've never met an evangelical like you.
	We are both, you as a Catholic, I as a Jew, have worked with them, we've never met one.
	If you wake them up at 3 a.m., they will not say that.
	If you inject them with truth serum, they will not say that.
	And people like Pastor John Hagee, the head of the largest Christian group in America, Christians United for Israel, has said over and over and over, there's nothing a Christian can do to hasten the second coming.
	So it's over.
	Don't think that way.
	And you get lies and lies built on lies.
	Do you know what I do when a Jew, a Jew tells me, you know, Dennis, please.
	And they write it in newspapers like it's truths.
	But I I hear it uh on the air or or pro or speeches that I give.
	Come on, Dennis.
	You know that Christian theology is the Jews have to go to Israel, then the apocalypse, and then this.
	So I said, boy, you really sound like you know your Christian theology.
	Just out of curiosity, can you name the four gospels?
	Never.
	Never.
	But this they know all of a sudden they're real mavens on Christian theology.
	They can't tell you the four gospels.
	It's it's just it's a force.
	That's that's so you what you've hit on is what you have hit on is as important about the left as it is about evangelicals.
	Let me ask you, Dennis, about education.
	It's a subject that you've talked about a lot on your on your radio show.
	Can you give us your assessment of the state of education, both at the K-12 level and in the universities, especially as it as it pertains to our civic life.
	You really want me to?
	I do, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, let me, I'll I'll be very uh I'll be understated.
	It's a disaster, it's a moral disaster, and it's a wisdom disaster.
	There's no wisdom taught, and uh let me tell you the wisdom one.
	You'll I think you'll really like this story.
	When I was at Columbia doing my graduate work, I was going crazy.
	I really was.
	I was I felt that I I I was in a in a in the twilight zone.
	It was not a happy period for me.
	It was a happy period outside of that, but that was a big part of my life.
	I shared nothing with my professors or my fellow students overwhelmingly.
	And uh I was uh I was taught what I understood to be nonsense.
	Men and women are basically the same.
	You give boys teacups and you give give girls uh trucks and then they'll be happy.
	I mean, I knew this is nonsense.
	Of course, male and female are intrinsically different.
	I was taught that the United States was, this was my field.
	I was at the Russian Institute under Brzezinski.
	And I was taught that the US and the Soviet Union were legally responsible for the Cold War.
	The mass murdering Stalin and Harry Truman were equally responsible for the Cold War.
	This is I'm I'm I'm in a sick place.
	So I kept asking, why am I learning nonsense?
	Why do they believe?
	Why does this professor it was all good guy, by the way, believe in Marxism?
	The guy believes that.
	He believes in these things.
	And so one day I was walking around Columbia, and in the on the 116th and Broadway, they have statues on the top of the buildings there, you know, of great thinkers, I think it is.
	I was looking there, and it's that's irrelevant to the I'm just telling you the situation.
	And all of a sudden, a verse from Yeshiva from kindergarten in first grade and second grade came to my mind in the morning prayers, which were all done in Hebrew, and of course, it was all wrote then.
	It didn't have any meaning.
	But one of them was we would say Ray Shit, Khokhma, yeah, the Adonai.
	And then I realized, oh my God, that's the answer.
	Wisdom begins with fear of God.
	There's no God at Columbia, there's no wisdom at Colombia.
	That was one of the great revelatory moments of my life.
	No God, no wisdom.
	There are ethical people with no God, but there's no wisdom in the secular world.
	None.
	All the there are individually wise secular people who could give you great advice on child rearing.
	And I have no doubt.
	I would go to a secular therapist who was brilliant.
	I understand that.
	But there's no wisdom in the secular world.
	How could there how could there be wisdom in a world that doesn't that doesn't believe there's purpose to it?
	That doesn't believe there's any any transcendent source or meaning.
	They have knowledge but no wisdom.
	So all of education today is knowledge without wisdom, and increasingly it's not even knowledge.
	Now we have gone, that was part A, now part B. It's indoctrination, not education.
	I wrote an essay.
	I I I want to make it into a little book, as twenty-seven things your child will learn at the at university.
	Like America, you know, America is essentially the history of a country of slavery and bigotry and imperialism.
	Are they going to learn that thanks to American troops, all the good?
	You know who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize on Earth?
	The American military.
	Who hears that at a university?
	Who hears that at high school now?
	Who hears that in elementary school now?
	So when parents tell me I want to take my kid out and and and uh and and give them um what is it called again?
	Homeschooling, I think you're right.
	That's why I founded Prager University.
	We give wisdom.
	You're you're gonna be one of the wisdom givers.
	We're honored to know that.
	I'm honored to announce that.
	You get five minutes of my wisdom.
	Yes, that you're dead.
	You're damn right.
	Five minutes from you beats beats 50 hours from the average guy.
	What uh what's your critique of the modern conservative uh uh movement?
	When we when we look back, we see that the conservative movement as a movement wasn't always on the right side of everything.
	Barry Goldwater opposed the 19 mid-1960s civil rights uh acts.
	Now, not because he was a racist.
	I don't think anybody believes that Barry Goldwater is a very important thing.
	Barry Goldwater founded the NAACP in Arizona.
	And his family's department store integrated itself without the coercion force of law.
	And yet, the civil rights movement, the conservative movement as a movement did not distinguish itself.
	Liberals distinguished themselves on civil rights.
	People like Hubert Humphrey uh distinguished themselves on civil rights.
	Now it's it's it's now how things have gone from there, uh uh I I I'll grant you uh Has not been so rosy.
	And many of the people who were civil rights liberals ended up in the conservative movement.
	Richard John Newhouse, Mary Ann Glendon, Leon and Amy Cass, lots of contemporary conservative leaders and intellectuals were liberal civil rights activists.
	And they believe that the liberal movement then went down the wrong direction.
	They don't repudiate what they stood for in civil rights, but they think that that is now what conservatism stands for, no longer what liberalism stands for.
	But what's your own critique, if you have one of the conservative movement?
	Where are we as conservatives going wrong?
	Let me first react to that first part, because I've learned a lot more since in the last few years, just for the record.
	Considerably more Republicans voted for civil rights legislation than Democrats.
	Oh, yes.
	But that wasn't liberal versus conservative.
	The Republican record was better than the Democratic.
	I don't believe that five percent of those getting it a BA in American history at this university know that.
	I'm sure you're right.
	Okay.
	That's very that's it's a it's an important little sidebar.
	Secondly, I have come to realize that Goldwater was probably right.
	And I never thought that.
	This is brand new in my life.
	It's hard to say because it makes me sound like I'm a bigot, because that's the way the left dismisses all alternative views on these matters.
	Uh the road that uh that legislation for civil rights has taken is so totalitarian.
	The road from that legislation to saying that you you will go to jail or be fined out of business unless you are a photographer at a same-sex wedding, irrespective of your religious views, is a direct line.
	Goldwater predicted it.
	Goldwater was pro-black.
	He founded the NAACP, as I noted, and you know, in Arizona.
	That's pretty pro pro uh integration and pro-black.
	Uh we would have been in the same space today.
	It would have taken a little longer, but we would have been in the same place because Americans were having contempt for racism.
	Ultimately, the American people properly and correctly had contempt for this evil and idiotic doctrine that race determines anything.
	The price we have paid for passing that legislation and opening this Pandora's box of depriving people of liberty.
	I have said on the air, and I will say tonight, I am a Jew, and I I will fight for your liberty not to allow me into your club because you're an anti-Semitic bastard.
	I want liberty for anti-Semitic bastards in America, because I treasure liberty more than I treasure my right to be in your country club.
	The reason I don't agree with you about the um the Civil Rights Act is that the argument reminds me very much, and it's parallel to the argument that some traditionalist conservatives of a kind of old Europe thrown and altar uh cast of mind make,
	that say the seeds of 1968 were planted in 1776, that you can't give people basic freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, without so eroding the foundations of moral order that you end up with the sex and drug revolution of uh of the 1960s.
	And that just seems to me to be wrong.
	I think our error was not in 1776, and I don't think it was in 1965.
	It was in permitting 1965 to be so badly abused, not defending or not defending well the principles of 1965, that enabled people who wanted a genuine revolution and not simply a reform.
	A reform to make good on the promise of the Declaration for Black Americans and enabled them to achieve a cultural revolution that they were not entitled to and was certainly not in the logic of 1965 any more than 1968 was in the logic of 17 uh 76.
	I I have another parallel from the Catholic world.
	Lots of people think that opting for the principles of the Second Vatican Council, again, coincidentally in 1965, opened the door for all the chaos and abuse that has happened within the Catholic Church since then.
	You know, all the way to liturgical abuses like clown masses.
	If you don't know about clown masses, you're lucky and I won't tell you.
	This is the priest dressing up like a clown, uh craziness like that, the belief that you can throw over the whole tradition of moral teaching of the Catholic Church, because gee, anything's up for grabs.
	If we can change the Mass from Latin to the vernacular, that means we can change moral teaching from uh uh no fornication to fornication.
	I think again, if you go back and if you look at the documents, you see the failure, not in the logic of the documents themselves, which are fine and good and excellent and needed, but it's in the failure to defend the authentic meaning and logic of the documents against those who would seize the documents as a pretext for advancing an agenda that's entirely alien to Catholicism.
	Over to you.
	Well, I just have to ask you.
	So now that you know what anti-discrimination legislation has led to entirely with 2020 hindsight.
	Yeah.
	Do you think we are better off for all the anti-discrimination legislation?
	Is America a more moral?
	Just say more moral.
	Is it is it a freer and is B is it more moral?
	I don't think that that's a legitimate question because history is not determined.
	It's contingent.
	The choices and actions of ourselves, the deliberations, judgments, choices and actions of ourselves as human beings, shape it.
	It was not necessary.
	It was not in the cards, it was not in the logic of 1965 that you would get the abuses that I grant you are all over the place today.
	We could have done something very different with the principles of the 1964 and 65 acts.
	And I fault those on our side, frankly, for failing to stand up for those true principles and letting them be abused and used as pretext for what we've been factoring.
	Oh, that may well be.
	But it's very hard, frankly, it is very hard to make the case.
	Oh, wait a minute.
	You're against bigotry when it comes to blacks, but not against bigotry when it comes to women?
	So what you answered that.
	You're you're you're a you're you're you now have you are on the stand and that's the question.
	You're okay, you're okay with uh bigotry against women but not blacks.
	Is that correct?
	That is not correct.
	Of course, the whole question is.
	Oh, so you are for legislation.
	What constitutes bigotry?
	That's the whole question.
	Does having having men's and women's restrooms separate but equal, constitute bigotry like the separate but allegedly equal black and white bathrooms?
	I'm prepared to defend the difference between racial and sexual differences, which means I'm a hundred percent with you.
	Good.
	Never the on that.
	But I but I will ask.
	So let me ask you.
	So can an employer say, you know, ma'am, you're really qualified and stuff, but frankly, I really want a guy because I feel better with guys working here.
	Or my wife is jealous if I have a if I have a cute secretary, and I really want a man.
	Are you okay with him doing that?
	Well, uh usually not okay with him doing it.
	There may be special circumstances in which the case.
	Well, wait, so then you would so then you would like legislation to protect women from bigotry.
	We have legislation to protect the bigger thing.
	I know that.
	So wait, so all right, so wait.
	So now Okay, that's separate, but there are times when there is bigotry.
	You acknowledge that.
	Restrooms are not one of them.
	Fine.
	Yeah, sure.
	So now, so you're okay with laws of dis anti-discrimination against blacks, laws of anti-discrimination against uh women, uh presumably Jews.
	Uh what about gays?
	Sure.
	It depends on what you mean by gays.
	Do you mean an orientation in the sense of inward desires, or do you mean the practice of forms of sexuality that are condemned by the great traditions of morality?
	Well, no, you might not you won't even know what the internal is.
	So obviously some some external uh I I I uh I'm closing up my uh my hotel because there's a gay pride parade here, and it's gonna my rooms are going to be filled with gays and I don't want to want them in the rooms.
	By the way, I think that person is wrong.
	I want to make that clear.
	I am against discrimination against gays.
	I am for protecting people's liberty, however.
	So that's so look, we you admit as I do.
	There's a liberty there is a there's a conflict of goods, if you will.
	I now believe that liberty has lost so bad that I am prepared to allow the bed of discrimination because the the bad of deprivation of liberty is now so much greater.
	I am not prepared to let the left dictate the meaning of bigotry, such that all the distinctions and norms of the great traditions, secular and religious, east and west, can be characterized and redescribed as bigotry by a sheer semantic act.
	That's what I'm against.
	Right.
	So uh I I I love that.
	I'm all on board, and I think it's utopian.
	You can't say not the first time.
	Some some bigotry against women is okay because it's really not bigotry, but other bigotry against women is not okay.
	The real issue, Dennis, is whether it's bigotry.
	It's not a question of redefining something.
	But you you are now your desire.
	You want to have the debate over what is liberty.
	I want to have a debate over what is bigotry.
	I understand.
	Okay, fair.
	Okay, look, as I always say I prefer clarity to agreement.
	We should now open the uh open the floor.
	Dennis and I have been dominating the conversation, but we only have him uh here for the evening, so I want you to get a chance to raise some questions.
	By the way, I'm on I'm on Pacific time, so I could stay long, but I don't I don't I don't know uh now uh our custom in the Madison program, Dennis, is to begin with student questions if we have students.
	So I'm I think there are actually some high school students and you count as students as well, college students, graduate students.
	Would any students like to uh open us up?
	And because we're recording this, we uh have microphones that we will hand anybody who wants to ask a question.
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	There we go.
	Hi, thank you for taking my question.
	Um you mentioned earlier that you thought um one of the things that functions as a litmus test for the viability of a religion going forward is its treatment of Jews.
	Um not just religion.
	I think the Jews form a litmus test for the viability of the moral compass.
	Uh uh that might alter the the form of the question.
	I was going to ask how you reconcile that with uh the recent Pew Research Center's results that in by 2005 uh Islam will be the fastest growing religion and the major religion in a number of European countries, as well as continuing to take upward trajectory in the United States.
	I think it's a problem.
	I uh if i i i you're not allowed to say that Islam today is a problem.
	Uh but I say it because I am protected because I broadcast.
	I have much more freedom of speech than anybody else at my radio station outside of my studio.
	I can say anything I like because I'm protected on the radio, but they they will go to human uh resources if they said half of what I say.
	But uh the president of Egypt, who is a Muslim, uh has spoken about we we have to really rethink a lot of what we have in our religion.
	And by the way, morality is almost always determined by whether or not you can critique your own group I mean properly we have now a critique of America that's improper.
	It's just absurd.
	But it's good to critique your own group.
	Anyway, yes uh I am worried and and I think it I look the uh the terror that we are observing in the world now that is produced by believing Muslims not all believing Muslims but that's an somewhat of an absurdity since virtually all the terror is committed by believing Muslims of course not all believing Muslims commit terror almost no Germans were Nazi mass murderers but it doesn't mean that there was not a a German problem
	between 1933 and 1945 a moral problem.
	There's a moral problem in Islam today.
	And so where did it begin?
	Well, it began a long time ago.
	But the modern terror started with the Palestinian bombers in Israel, pizza places and dance halls and bar mitzvahs and universities.
	And the world did nothing, said nothing and did nothing.
	Then the world started getting attacked.
	The Jews are the world's miners'canary.
	I don't like the role.
	I can't stand it.
	But it's true.
	And how you, your attitudes, toward Jews and the Jewish state is a litmus test of the functional viability of your moral compass.
	And so it does it say anything about the Islamic world today?
	Does it say anything about the United Nations today?
	Does it say anything about the left today?
	I think it does.
	But as you yourself say, there are a great many Muslims, undoubtedly the majority of Muslims, certainly the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the United States, who are opposed to terrorism, who are opposed to the imposition of their religion by political means, and with whom we should be, it seems to me, allied.
	And yet there is a barrier between us and them.
	I'm not talking about radical jihadist Islamists, a barrier so often between Christians and Jews on the one side and Muslims on the other side that seems to prevent our working together even if we're on the same side even if we're on the same side in attacking radicalism.
	Well I can only tell you that among conservatives people like uh uh Zudi Jasser who is a believing Ramadan fasting uh a five times a day praying Muslim who's a physician in Phoenix my colleague on the U.S. Commission on international religious okay so do we not embrace that man?
	You know who doesn't embrace that man?
	NBC C BS ABC when they want Muslim spokesmen they bring in care.
	But we should be bringing in we do we do bring in Zudi Jackson I mean it's not just Zudi.
	There are professors and I I write I do have hope that these people can prevail and if they do prevail it will be American Muslims.
	That's right.
	America is the healthiest place on earth and there will be American Muslims who will lead the reform.
	Do you notice a common feature there and that is if you look at assimilation the United States yet again is showing itself with respect to our Muslim fellow citizens to be just overwhelmingly more adept at assimilating people than Europe is.
	If you go to European nation after European nation including Britain you know which in so many ways is like us you find Muslim communities really self segregating and so many Muslims people who are not radical Refusing or not feeling as though they're welcome in the mainstream of society.
	Our Muslim population stands out as distinguished for its assimilation now.
	That's America.
	That's e-pluribus unum.
	American uh American Trinity, e.
	pleurbus unum in God We Trust and Liberty.
	That's unique.
	Uh because we're an idea, we're not an ethnicity.
	It's the left that wants to make us ethnic.
	What are you?
	One you know, one sixteenth Cherokee, because you have high cheekbones.
	I mean, who's talking about Elizabeth Warren now?
	Yes, I'm talking about Elizabeth Warren now.
	Oh, it's 132nd.
	You could you got that was her.
	Student questions.
	Any other students have uh questions?
	Okay.
	If oh, yes, we've got one right over here.
	Yes, sir.
	Thanks, Chanel.
	We are now engaging in ageism.
	Um just very quickly a clarification as we were just talking about the idea of um the Muslim religion in the world in Islam.
	Um you said you were concerned or with the issue of Islam, as we were just pointing from Professor George, the kind of difference um in extremism versus a general religious belief, just for a clarification of do you think it's a fundamental problem to Islam as an entire system or religion, or as we were just pointing at the extremism?
	Dennis and I might have a difference on this.
	I do not think the problem is with Islam.
	Right.
	I think the problem is with radicalism.
	And I've even you know written up uh uh an essay in which I say I think that the fundamental problem is not that radical jihadists are trying to go back to the eighth century.
	The problem is they're adopting ideologies that are distinctively 20th century, the same ideologies that gave us Bolshevism and Nazism and every other horrible thing.
	Yeah, we do differ.
	And I I wish he I wish I agreed.
	I do wish I'd have more hope.
	Uh just to give you an example, in my book on on Islamism, Americanism, and leftism, I I it's all documented.
	That's the the book there's still the best hope.
	Uh uh Ibn Khaldun is considered the greatest Muslim thinker who ever lived.
	He he uh Toyme B said is he wrote the greatest masterpiece ever written, the Mukadimah, the introduction to history.
	Uh it was the Middle Ages, and he wrote, why are we greater than all religions?
	Why are we greater than Christians or Jews or the other monotheists?
	Why?
	Because unlike them, we have jihad.
	We are prepared to kill people to take our religion.
	Christians and Jews are not.
	And this is this is verbatim from uh from the mukadima.
	The the majority of Muslims in many Muslim countries, Pakistan and Egypt, for example, believe that if you if you do convert from Islam, you should be executed.
	They didn't make this up.
	That is traditional Islamic belief.
	I I get no joy saying this.
	I wish I could think, you know what, there's this extraterrestrial being that descended on earth in the 20th century called the radical Muslim.
	Do you know how many Hindus were killed over a thousand over the thousand-year rule of the of the Muslims in India?
	Approximately eighty million.
	Uh in the uh in their story of history, Ariel and uh Ariel and uh Will.
	Will Durant uh wrote this was the greatest uh mass murder in the history of the world.
	You can't teach this in India because they're afraid that Hindus will be angry at Muslims and cause civil unrest.
	Even though the head of the India Historical Association in the 1930s was the one who who finally revealed this.
	You know what Hindu Kush means?
	Hindukush is that mountain range in Iran going to Afghanistan.
	It means slaughtered Hindus.
	How many people know that?
	One.
	There you go.
	In row four.
	So uh unfortunately we we do differ on this one.
	I I do agree, I don't doubt that uh you know the poll, the polling data shows this, that you know, in fact, uh the majority of people in Pakistan and Egypt, Muslims in Pakistan and Egypt do believe that the punishment for apostasy should be should be death.
	One of the things that we're doing on our commission is trying to fight against exactly those kinds of beliefs.
	But you would find a very different kind of belief among American Muslims.
	Now, American Muslims don't like apostasy any more than American Christians like apostasy.
	But whether civil authorities should be able to penalize it and indeed penalize it with death, American Muslims would tend to be much more closely in line with American Christians and American Jews.
	Let me just say on behalf of Christians, if I may, because I'm big Christian defense.
	American American Christian.
	America is the great place.
	American Muslims are better, American Christians are better, American Jews are problem.
	but I just give you one example my wife was raised an evangelical Christian she's converted to Judaism when we are at evangelical conferences I I've never said this to you.
	I have watched I like a hawk, I watch the Christians when you tell them when they ask, and they say, you converted.
	Unless I am really dense, and I don't think I am, I see nothing but acceptance.
	That's all I see in them.
	Let alone wanting her executed.
	Forget that they don't want her executed.
	They just continue to talk to her and love her as they did prior to to learning of that.
	That's a big deal.
	I have a call, you might enjoy that.
	I have a colleague who is Jewish, uh not especially uh devout, but not unbelieving, uh, who had a beloved student, graduate student, uh, who was herself Jewish, is Jewish, but who converted to Catholicism and indeed became a nun.
	Now my colleague's wife is Jewish, but entirely secular, no belief whatsoever.
	She is the one upset that the Jewish girl converted to Catholicism and became a nun.
	And I'm saying, huh?
	There's an old Jewish joke that a number of Jewish husbands think they're married to a nun.
	Okay, now we'll open it up more generally.
	I saw Tom Pyle's hand.
	It's only a joke, okay?
	I just want to say it's a joke.
	Glad my wife's not here.
	Well, I'm sure I speak for many of us to say it's such a joy to see the two wonderful uh titans of uh right thinking uh inspiring us here in Princeton for those of us who are battling behind enemy lines, as I sometimes like to say.
	So it's really such a joy to see you both together.
	Uh you raised, I think both of you, this interesting idea that a Jew should have some theology for Christianity, and likewise Christians should have some theology for Judaism.
	I wonder if then you might coach us then how should we Christians or Jews construct a theology for for Islam and be able to then better adapt and understand uh how Islam is working and moving through the world.
	Why don't you answer that?
	What's your theology uh as a Christian of Islam?
	Well, well, it's interesting.
	My my theology of uh Islam is provided by the Second Vatican Council.
	I'm a Catholic, right?
	So that's an ecumenical council, and I'm supposed to believe what it says.
	And actually the teaching of the Second Vatican Council with respect to Islam is quite a positive uh teaching.
	It's one that quite explicitly recognizes the terrible history of conflict uh between Muslims and Christians, and it and it pleads for Muslims and Christians alike to, as it says, the translation is put aside past quarrels and work together for our common values of piety,
	uh justice, uh morality, and and and these these ends that are uh common to our own, to to both our faiths and to the Jewish uh uh tradition.
	Uh the the document praises uh Islamic monotheism, uh, its practices of frequent prayer and almsgiving.
	The document says something that a lot of Catholics can't quite buy, but it's their church teaching them that Muslims worship the God.
	They worship the true God, that Allah is God.
	a lot of Catholics and other Christians, that's tough to swallow.
	Because I think Allah refers to some other being, not the God of the Jewish revelation that Christians worship.
	Now, it was a little less difficult for me to get hold of that, because my father is Syrian, and I grew up uh in a family on my father's side of Arabic speakers, and they were Eastern Orthodox Christians, but they referred to God as Allah all the time.
	So I it wasn't shocking for me uh to hear that uh God called Allah, but what the what the church is teaching us there is that there's a common bond in the worship of God.
	Now, is there a different understanding of God in important respects?
	Yes.
	Yes, absolutely.
	But the church is teaching us in the document Nostra etate of the Second Vatican Council, which is famous as the document that repudiated Christian anti-Semitism, the allegation of deocide against the Jews, the replacement theology, and so forth.
	Uh it's in the document Nostra etata, it's teaching us that just as Catholics cannot regard the mother faith of Judaism as simply false.
	They've got to regard Judaism as true as far as it goes.
	It's teaching us that we cannot regard Islam as simply false, and we must honor, and I quote, all that is true and holy in these other faiths, including Islam.
	Now, if if a religion is just purely false, like Satanism, or to name another religion, Bolshevism, or Nazism, which I think are more religions than anything else.
	If they're simply false, then there's nothing true and holy to be to be honored in them.
	But Islam isn't treated by the Catholic church as being in that category.
	Now, other Christians are gonna who are not Catholics quite likely going to see this very differently.
	Dennis, I I have a slightly more radical view.
	Uh I never ask uh which religion is true, because there are Jews in my religion whose uh whose practices are so foreign to me that while they are clearly members of the Jewish people, because just like they're Americans who were f have practices foreign to me, or they're Americans, but in terms of Judaism, there are some there are some things.
	Look, there are it's a small group, I want to make this clear, but there are ultra-Orthodox Jews who went to Iran to celebrate Ahmadinejad.
	Anti-Zionist.
	Yes, anti-Zionist, not leftist, but anti-Zionist super religious Jews.
	Is their religion my religion?
	I don't have my religion has nothing in common with their religion.
	So whereas your religion has far more in common with my religion, though you're Catholic and I'm Jewish.
	So I I my question is, does your religion theologically, theological and a moral question?
	Theologically, does your religion bring you to the God of the Torah?
	That's my question.
	Or the God of Israel, if you will.
	Ask that to a Muslim, ask that to a Christian.
	Christians will say, of course.
	If the Muslim says, of course, great, then theologically, we're we're we're we're you have kinship.
	The second one is what is the fruit of your religion?
	That's what matters.
	Are you producing God-fearing good people?
	That's the question.
	I just last night this question arose.
	Uh we had uh that uh snack where I ate more than anyone last night.
	Uh with uh what religion is he?
	Is he Catholic?
	He was a Catholic we had dinner with.
	So it was an interesting question that I posed.
	Uh I'd like to pose it to you.
	It'll put you on the spot.
	What's the snack?
	What was the snack?
	Pork rhymes or whatever.
	No, no, no.
	There were no pork rhymes.
	He would have been snacking on pork rhymes and he wasn't having anything.
	Uh by the way, I just have to say that what is that?
	What is that?
	Um It's Oh, yeah.
	I tell my uh Mormon friends that it's a hell of a lot easier to abstain from pork than coffee.
	So, you know.
	Amen, brother.
	I got it.
	So let me tell you, I can live porch more, as the rabbi said about something else.
	But uh a good cigar and a good coffee.
	That's that's the essence of life.
	Here's the question.
	You are about to form uh a uh a business, and you you need a business partner to do so, and the key is that you uh trust that he he will be honest.
	It's key, or you're you will lose your money.
	All you know, and we'll say it's a man.
	All you know it could be a woman, it's irrelevant.
	All you know about this man is that the person is a Jew, a a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Mormon.
	Who who would you choose?
	Unless it's Harry Reid, the Mormon.
	Okay.
	That's that is a great answer.
	And by the way, I never thought I'm gonna add the Harry Repart, and I'll quote you on that.
	It's perfect.
	That that he is in good standing is a big problem for me.
	But okay.
	Uh that's right.
	Everyone I ask says the Mormon.
	So I know I know that Protestants, I don't know how Catholics are view uh uh L uh LDS, but I know uh Protestants have a very hard time.
	They don't work they're not Christians.
	Yes, they view them as and I'm not I'm again I have no uh no horse in the race.
	Not only no horse in the race, it's not for me to judge.
	Although I did say to I'm very close to a lot of Mormons, and I said, I don't know why you have to uh even fight this battle.
	You know, I you you keep insisting.
	I th I think there's some intellectual legitimacy that Christianity doesn't only mean do you worship Christ, it means that you you're you have the Trinity as tru as uh the the uh as declared at Nicaea.
	So anyway, it doesn't matter.
	But everybody picks the Mormon.
	Now, these if these people are producing God-fearing honest, decent people, I am gonna say their religion is false.
	Oh, you'd pick them because they produce honest, decent, hardworking people.
	I was just picking them because they're giving me an honorary degree at BYU next week.
	No, no, no, no.
	I don't believe that, no one else does.
	We all know why.
	I know no, that's not what as I would love to be your guest.
	But uh no, no, no.
	You're picked them because everybody that I've asked the question to, every Jew I asked, every Catholic and every Protestant said the Mormon.
	That's an unbelievable reputation to have.
	That's staggering.
	So why so is it false in some theological sense?
	That's your business to judge.
	I doesn't bother me.
	It's not my issue.
	These are Bible believing, God-fearing, honest people, by and large, producing wonderful families and wonderful Americans.
	And I'm gonna call that false.
	So that's why if the Muslim is producing God-fearing God of the Torah, God of the Ten Commandments, Muslims, he's my man.
	Yeah.
	And if he's producing other things, he's not my man.
	But of course, and I agree with that completely.
	I just add, not that you would uh deny it, that the record of all the religions is pretty mixed on that.
	I mean, and by mixed I mean mixed, not not just bad, not just bad.
	It wouldn't, you know, promote the Richard Dawkins view.
	I mean, there have been tremendous good done in the name of all these religions.
	That's right, and when they say, you know what, well, look at what the Catholic church was doing in the in the 10th century, which which as I mentioned earlier with the uh we both knew, but no very few people know.
	Well, why don't we try it out on our audience?
	Why don't we just try it out?
	How many people were killed over 300 years in the Crusades?
	I tried this out of the in the Spanish Inquisition.
	How many um you're right, what am I thinking?
	The inquisition.
	How many people were killed over 300 years?
	I tried this out on my uh pal Cornell West were co-teaching and at our seminar the other evening.
	I asked him the question, the question came up, and uh he didn't get it right, and I'm wondering if you would get it right.
	So somebody shout out an answer.
	600 things a million, a million?
	Anyone more than a million?
	Do I hear?
	Well, a million going one.
	Two million.
	A lot of these people are my listeners.
	Oh, they're good.
	So they're not going to be able to do that.
	So Lister and Dennis now give us the right answer.
	Well, I never said that.
	That's a few thousand.
	Right.
	It's about six, seven thousand.
	Six, seven thousand over three hundred years, yeah.
	And compare that with the exactly.
	Uh or or or the Armenian.
	You know, we talk about the Armenian genocide.
	Who committed that?
	This is the yes, this is the this is the Ottoman Empire.
	The point isn't to hate Muslims.
	If you hate Muslims, you're a fool.
	You're a bigot.
	That is to be bigoted.
	But it is a liar to lie about the moral problem of Islam in historically.
	It's not been a religion of peace.
	I don't get any joy in saying it.
	It hasn't been.
	That's the only real lie he told.
	But it's record is mixed.
	It's record, it's not mixed, but every it's like saying your record is mixed, and so is Charles Manson's record mixed.
	No, no, but I'm not sure.
	No, no, no.
	No, no, no.
	And I'm not, I am not comparing Islam to Charles Manson.
	I'm comparing mixed to mixed.
	Mix doesn't tell me anything unless they're mixed equally.
	Are you are they mixed equally?
	No, they're not mixed equally.
	Okay, say, and by the way, let me say some of my colleagues would like that.
	They would like that.
	Let me let me just say on behalf, okay.
	I'm gonna say something good about the Jews.
	It's not such a mixed record.
	We don't, we didn't uh uh persecute people generally speaking, because there was no theological reason to do so, because we never believed the most fanatical Jew doesn't believe you have to be a Jew to be saved.
	It has never even entered the Jewish lexicon.
	So there would be no reason to have theological persecution from Jews.
	I have big problems, obviously, with Jewish leftists and anti-Zionists and pro-BDS and all that stuff, but I don't think the Jewish record is mixed.
	Now you might say, well, Jews had no power for two thousand years.
	It's a completely legitimate uh thing to say.
	I agree.
	But but nobody, you know what Jackie Mason is right.
	Who fears going into a Jewish neighborhood?
	Wow, you know, as he put, oh, you know that I'm gonna get mugged by an accountant.
	Okay, let's be honest.
	All right?
	With all their faults, you're not afraid, you you know, the the the Jewish rape crowd is not very large.
	Our uh uh our dear Chanel, uh, she who must be obeyed is signaling me that we have gone over, but Chanel, I'm gonna take one more, one more question, okay?
	So uh yeah, the lady right up, yeah, thank you, right up here in the middle.
	You can you can close us out for the evening.
	I hate to see this come to an end, Dennis.
	My goodness, it's been so long.
	Yeah, I've loved it.
	Thank you.
	Hi, very simple question.
	Um you mentioned that your main fear or concern is the evil in the world.
	Did I understand well?
	Yes.
	Um have Jews contributed to the evil of the world?
	Have Jews contributed to the evil of the world at all?
	If you can mention one or two names.
	Do you know that the uh the uh uh most pro-communist press in the Western world was the Yiddish press in the 1930s?
	This is from a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University.
	Jewish leftists have been horrific.
	Horrific.
	Trotsky was a Jew.
	Three of the five possible successors, Zanoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky were all Jews.
	The only the only non-Jews were Bukharin and uh Stalin, Jukashvili.
	And outside, three of the five members of the Polish Politburo were Jews.
	The head uh the the biggest Stalinist in Congary was uh Anna Pauka, who was a Jew.
	Uh I I I uh Jews Jews don't like, but but none of them were Jewish Jews.
	They were they were born, they were racial Jews.
	They they hated Judaism.
	So, but uh but I you are right.
	Jews, if you pick as a purely ethnic group, have contributed to evil.
	There is no question about it.
	But again, like everybody else of every other well, there's a big difference if you hate your religion and do evil, then if you love your religion and do evil.
	There is a big difference.
	You can't say that there is a moral equivalence Of mixed baggedness to your religion.
	How many Jews did this stuff in the name of Judaism?
	Very, very few.
	Please join me in thanking Dennis Prager.
	Thank you.
	Robin, you're great.
	You're great.
	This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

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