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Nov. 11, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
31:23
Timeless Wisdom - Should Women Serve in Combat?
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
I've been invited to speak on a very difficult subject.
It's difficult for two reasons.
One is because of the subject.
The other is because I've been asked to speak specifically on the Jewish tradition.
The reason that is so difficult is because there are many Jewish traditions on almost every subject.
And so I hasten to add at the outset that intellectual religious honesty demands that I say that it is impossible to represent all Jews on anything except that H2O makes water.
And even on that, there are some rabbinic differences.
So it is important that that be established at the outset.
However, if you are to invite a religious Jew, which I am, I'm about as normative a religious Jew as you can find.
One of my books, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, published by Simon and Schuster, is the most widely used introduction to Judaism in the world.
I just say that so you'll understand.
It is used by Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Jews equally, as well as by non-Jews interested in Judaism.
So I do come from a normative background.
I, too, am a talk show host, in my case on secular radio on KABC here in Los Angeles.
I'm on nightly.
I don't broadcast on my Sabbath.
It's pre-recorded.
My station has allowed me to do that, for which I'm extremely grateful.
Having said that, I should also add that while I have extensive Jewish credentials, I have absolutely no military credentials.
I know nothing about military life.
And it has struck me that one of the most obvious perspectives on this issue has to come first and foremost from the military.
There may not be a Jewish position specifically addressed to this issue, but there is a Jewish position called Secho, which broadly translated means common sense.
Perhaps, as Mark Twain said, the least common feature in the human condition.
It's a true misnomer, common sense.
It strikes me that society should have only one question with regard to the military.
How do you make it effective?
It is no more a place for social experimentation than a baseball team is.
Would anybody argue when we have hearings on having women play baseball?
Of course not.
Because if they could do the job, they would be on a team.
But they can't do the job.
So the only question is, from that perspective alone, from the military perspective, is, without the slightest bit of affirmative action, I'm speaking now gender-wise, without any gender norming whatsoever, can women do exactly the same job as men can do?
Strikes me that the only people capable of answering that are the military, not us from outside the military, and not all the people who have social experiments to create in society.
Having said that, a lot of questions raise themselves.
And they are, and they have probably been questions that you have dealt with, therefore I won't deal with them at great length.
Number one, no order of importance.
The issue of the simple physical question, without any gender norming, can women do the same in combat.
Number two, the male bonding question.
Some women's groups dismiss that question as a male chauvinist question.
I don't.
Since my only purpose for the United States military is that it win, I want to know what will enable it to win.
If in fact male bonding is the element or an element that enables it to win, without which there is a chance that more Americans die, that is a very real question.
If we want to combat male bonding in society, we can do that outside the military.
But it doesn't strike me that that's the first place to start.
One might answer, however, as one Marine rabbi that I spoke to about this before coming, he said it is not male bonding as much as it's combat bonding.
I don't know.
That's a very fair question to ask, however.
The question of rape is a question that has been answered to my satisfaction by a woman who was, in fact, anally and vaginally abused by Iraqis, and I've commented on this publicly.
And her attitude was that, in fact, she thought she got off better than the men who were captured did, who were actually tortured.
That between the two disgusting forms of behavior, she preferred being sexually abused to being tortured.
I thought that was very forthright of her to say that, and it may very well deal with the question.
However, Americans have to be prepared to know that the overwhelming odds are that women soldiers who are captured will be raped.
It is as simple as that.
If the society is prepared to live with that, it should live with that.
But it should not deny for a moment that if 10,000 women are captured, and that could happen, 10,000 women will be raped and possibly worse.
Listen, women civilians are raped by conquering armies.
So obviously, women enemy soldiers are going to be dealt with even more harshly than women civilians.
Next, what if both parents enlist?
What do we do then?
Do we say only one parent can go, or are we going to be the first society in history to ensure that children become orphans?
Or are you going to say no, only one parent can enlist, at which point egalitarians will come up and say, uh-uh, it's not fair.
You can't discriminate against husband X because wife Z is in, or wife Z because husband X is in.
So then what will we do?
Likewise, will we have daycare centers on battleships?
I promise you, I promise you as I sit here that that will be the next demand after this.
Maybe it is an appropriate demand.
I am convinced that there are those who want women in combat, primarily for the purposes of rendering it basically a kindergarten.
A representative from the National Organization for Women on this man's show yesterday, following my appearance on his show, as it happens coincidentally, said that.
She said she wants women in combat so that there'd be less war because women are intrinsically opposed to war from her perspective.
Is that the aim?
These are the fair, honest, real questions to be answered.
I don't have these answers, but I don't think we should skirt around the real issues here.
The purpose of a baseball team is to win a baseball game.
The purpose of an army is to win a war, to save civilization.
And I say save civilization for a very obvious reason.
There has not been a war in the 20th century between two democracies.
Every single war in the 20th century has been either between a democracy and a police state, or two police states, as in the case of Stalin and Hitler.
So that when the United States fights in a war, it is definitionally not a war against another democracy, but against the police state, which, if it wins, means a decimation of a good part of civilization.
So the United States military actually stands as guardian over the civilized values that everyone in this room, left, right, or center, cares about.
So it's not the place, I think, to experiment at any time unless all these questions are answered satisfactorily.
So I have not taken any concrete position vis-a-vis them.
I just think honesty is critical.
Next.
There are long periods without a spouse in the service.
And at the same time, you are spending that time not only without your spouse, but with many members of the opposite sex in very, very intimate setting, in a very bonding setting.
Is this good for the family?
It strikes me that in the America of 1992, the question of what is happening to the American family is a more important question than the one of whether women can fight on ships or women can fight in planes or on the ground.
Society has a lot of questions facing it.
This is one of them.
It may not be the most important.
If America survives or not will not be answered by the question with all respect that this commission comes up with an answer to.
But whether or not the family survives in America will answer the question, will America survive?
Everything in life is a matter of prices paid.
If you choose X, you lose Y. There is no question but that family life will be hurt by this decision.
You may answer, c'est la vie, and I mean that sincerely.
You may answer that is life, that is for people to choose who are we in society to tell people that they can or cannot endanger their family life.
The answer, I think, is that we are all in this together, that this is a societal decision, and we do pay a societal price.
Nothing comes free.
When Milton Friedman was asked after winning the Nobel Prize for Economics if he could summarize his economics knowledge in a sentence, he said, no problem, there ain't no free lunches.
I beg this commission to understand, whatever decision it comes to, what are the prices?
Here is a price that is assured.
The price of family problem is creating.
It may be worth it for those who hold that women doing everything that men do is so important, and I do not say this disparagingly, but those who hold it may say, sorry, if that's the price paid, let it be paid.
But that is a price that you must understand will be paid by having spouses away from their families and with the opposite sex for prolonged periods of time in very intimate and bonding surroundings.
With regard to the physical question, one can say, look at police.
Do not police women do a good job?
It strikes me that if the answer is yes, that helps us answer the issue.
Probably police women and men are in combat more frequently than the average soldier is or has been in the last perhaps 20 years of the United States.
However, there is no mass number of mothers threatened.
Perhaps a police woman tragically will die in Seattle one day and perhaps six months later in Milwaukee or something.
But that's two women, maybe ten women, God forbid, in the course of the year.
But in the course of a war, you are talking about thousands, potentially tens of thousands.
That is a price, too, that we must be prepared to pay if we do this.
We need honesty here, and I am afraid that given the current state of American media, of which I am a member of, with no pride whatsoever, I believe that the media are profoundly afraid of dealing with many subjects, honestly, if they affront the politically correct thinking in America today.
But I would like to know, I read somewhere that a disproportionate number of women claimed or actually got pregnant prior to the Gulf War.
Is that true?
If that's true, that's a big deal.
And by the way, I don't blame them.
I blame them from an American perspective.
I don't blame them from a personal perspective in the sense that the woman in her may have overtaken the soldier in her.
Whereas men don't tend to think quite that way, aside from the fact that male pregnancy, until now, can figure out a way to ensure it, is not something that we have been able to create in the United States.
If there is any medical possibility, I promise you that that will be worked on.
These are the questions that I believe need to be asked.
This country has serious problems.
This doesn't strike me as among its biggest.
The family does.
The cohesion of family, the raising of children with parents, the having of a mother, what will be done if tens upon tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of women are called up and their husbands in many instances, and all of these scenes are seen on television.
Will this affect our ability to fight?
Of course it will.
Let's not be naive about it.
And is that part of the agenda?
That's a fair question.
Notice I have not said women cannot do the job.
I don't know.
Only military people know.
But I beg, I beg the Commission, because you're under great pressure, I am sure, from every perspective, to ask these hard questions, because they are hard.
I would like to conclude with thoughts on the Jewish positions on war and on males and females.
The Jewish position on war has been that when morally necessary, it is a moral good.
There is virtually no pacifist tradition in Judaism.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that pacifism, which means that all killing of human beings is evil, wrong, sinful, is itself a sinful position.
I would argue, as a Jew and as a human being, that the soldiers who killed Nazis during World War II to save more people, especially Jews, but not only Jews, from being gassed and experimented on in grisly medical experiments, were engaged in the holiest act a human being could engage in in those years.
It was holier than studying the Bible.
It was holier than prayer.
To kill a Nazi was the greatest good a human being could do during World War II, during those years.
I therefore hold the role of military in deep, deep respect and honor and understand the good that it does in a very flawed world.
There are really bad people out there and they cannot be stopped all the time solely by appeals to their conscience.
They can only be stopped frequently the way bacteria are stopped by destroying them.
I don't say this with joy.
I say it with the perspective of reality.
Therefore, I deeply venerate the role of a man or a woman helping to fight against evil forces in this world, Saddam Hussein being, in my opinion, an Arab version of Adolf Hitler.
Don't ask me, ask the Kuwaitis, and one day you will be able to ask the Iraqis if you think there is any exaggeration in that particular claim.
As far as male-females are concerned, Judaism holds two very strong positions.
One, that there is absolute equality between the genders.
If you read Genesis, you read God created Adam, Adam being generic for human being, male and female, he created them.
Zacharu Nekeva Barautam.
The Hebrew is very, very clear.
In other words, a human being is not fully human without the other sex.
This is a basic Jewish tenet, which has certainly been carried on through Christendom.
That that is the way God created the human being, and the two of them are absolutely equal.
At the same time, Judaism has always had some division of roles within it.
For example, Judaism is a religion of law.
There are, in fact, literally thousands of laws in Judaism.
Every law in Judaism that is time-bound, and that includes many Jewish laws, women, by definition, are absolved from doing.
Jews are obligated by traditional Jewish law to pray three times a day.
The woman is not obligated to pray once a day.
She can, of course, if she wishes, she can pray all day.
But she is not obligated because there are times when those prayers are scheduled.
The reason?
Somebody had to take care of the family, the cohesive unit of life.
How do we know that?
When God blesses Abraham, the first monotheist, God says, and through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
The kernel, the element that creates society is the family, not the nation.
You would think that God would have said in Genesis, through you all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
No, through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Nations come and go, but if the family goes, everything goes.
It is such a truism in American life that it is wondrous that it is simply not universally held.
That parents raising children is where it is at.
The future of society is dependent upon that cohesiveness.
It's so obvious that it's, as I say, wondrous, that it's not simply universally understood.
Society has competing aims.
One aim is to enable women to do everything they want.
I understand that aim and I support that aim.
My cantor is a woman.
I am for egalitarianism in my synagogue, as it happens.
I am very, very sensuous.
However, at the same time, there are primary obligations that do fall in the tradition on the woman.
She cannot say, I don't care about the children.
I will go out.
She can say that if her husband will stay home, obviously.
Generally, however, that is a fantasy of PhD theses.
It is not real life that men offer to be house husbands and house fathers while the women go out.
In that regard, one final word.
There are many possible ways of reading text.
And I appreciate deeply what my friend, truly my friend Jon Stewart, has said earlier.
Let me offer you a slightly different reading of the creation of woman after man.
You can read it as, and some do, as the female being an afterthought.
God created man, that central thing, and then later, woman was created from him.
There were feminists who say, look at how sexist the Bible is.
It has woman created for man almost as an afterthought.
May I offer you a totally contrary reading?
And that is this.
All of creation in Genesis is toward a higher creation.
Everything goes from primitive to advanced, finally culminating in the creation of the human being.
But there is something after the human being, and only one thing, and that's the female.
So there are many ways of reading this and of understanding it.
Do we want that creation to be simply part of the process of killing and shooting and dying?
Maybe we do.
It's a very heavy question.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Fragran, and both of you for your, I think, very thoughtful presentations.
We're now ready for questions.
I see Commissioner Ray has one, so I'll go ahead and recognize him.
I wonder if you might both comment on the Gnostic strain which seems to constantly war against Judaism and certainly against Christianity, maybe against all of the, where the woman is always the loser, always allied with darkness.
And to what extent, you know, we keep looking for where this radical gender feminism comes from, kind of looking for its root to attack a lot of the values that we hold up.
And I wonder if you might talk about the, maybe Mr. Frager could talk a little bit about the biblical basis and his tradition about it, but I'm interested in whether or not that's an underlying philosophy here.
The war of the two opposites, in other words, choosing good and evil from the knowledge of good and evil as opposed to obeying a revealed law, the difference in that tradition, and wonder if either one of you could comment on that and whether we're seeing that carried out in so many of these totalitarian systems get into a Gnostic philosophy at a school or not.
I'm not fully certain as to what you're leading to, Zoo.
If this helps us, it does, if not, maybe restate it if you want.
I heard one of the questions being, where are some of the origins of this radical feminism?
And the other element that I heard was about the portrayal of the female as a dark force.
There is no suggestion in my religion of the female as a dark force.
On the contrary, it is a given that there are gender differences and that morally both are equal, but with regard to aggression, clearly men are inherently more aggressive.
The only people who deny that have advanced degrees is a very important point.
It is the people who deny that live by George Orwell's statement about a similar idea, a related idea.
And he said that it's an idea so stupid, only an intellectual can believe it.
It is exactly, you literally, every time on my thought show, somebody calls in and says, men and women are basically the same.
I ask them what graduate school they went through.
Because I know that they had to have a graduate education.
Because nobody in living real life, especially no parent of a boy or a girl, ever says something so foolish.
We are intrinsically different.
You give boys dolls, and they'll rip their heads off.
You give girls trucks, and they'll cradle it.
That's the way it works.
Sure, there are exceptions.
There are exceptions to all rules.
We have become a society which enshrines the exception, and for the vast majority of people, assumes that the exception applies.
But it doesn't.
We are different.
And thank God for that difference.
One of the masculine features of men that most women love is that we are an inherently aggressive creature.
However, we have to tone it down with moral values.
That is why in Judaism there are more laws for men than for women.
It sees men as needing far more of self-discipline in that regard than women do.
And that makes a great deal of sense.
And so certainly that issue didn't come.
The origin from Judaism, the origins of this radical feminism that you speak, and I already spoke of my own commitment to egalitarianism in my own religious life.
So I profoundly believe in that.
But we have a phenomenon today of a war with what the French call les fait de la vig, the facts of life.
The fact of life that people, for example, David Horowitz was talking about, people are intrinsically not peace-loving, beautiful creatures.
No one fantasizes at night helping elderly women cross the street.
Our deepest fantasies are dark fantasies.
I have no problem with that.
None whatsoever.
One of the themes of my religion is know that you're id, that your inner self has a lot of miserable parts to it.
And that what matters only, only, is what you do, how you express it.
It is an area where, with the deepest sense of respect, I sometimes have differences with my Christian friends, wherein how you feel and what you think and how you lust are sinful questions, not for us.
How you act is sinful or not, not how you think.
So the dark sides of human nature are being made war against.
And in this regard, I believe that radical feminism is a desire to translate reality into theory.
The theory, men and women are basically the same, and therefore I will do everything possible in reality to ensure that sameness.
I don't think that that is a healthy development.
I'll respond.
May I add a comment here, Commissioner?
This is not apropos of what we were just saying.
It just struck me as developing a theme that is more important the more I think about it.
Let's say the United States is considering war again, as it did with regard to Saddam Hussein.
And there were many women then in combat.
It was decided that women should be in combat.
I can foresee with great clarity that those opposed to all use of military force in the United States would then have a very powerful, added argument against war, saying, are you going to send 10,000 women, 10,000 or 8,000 mothers to die?
I think that that issue of is this really a battering ram against the use of our military needs to be honestly addressed.
And I never would have thought of it had I not heard a member of the National Organization for Women say on the radio yesterday that one of the reasons she wants this is to render war less likely.
That is a very important consideration that needs to be addressed.
I also, at that point, want to add one other thing.
What if 10,000 American women are raped and 5,000 come back pregnant?
Very feasible possibility.
What do you do then?
You just have 5,000 abortions.
What if they come back in the eighth month?
When everybody, left to right, acknowledges that viable life is there.
What do you do then?
Do you have 5,000 kids born to rape women American soldiers?
Or are these just academic questions in the frenzy of egalitarianism in our society?
Okay, very good.
Commissioner Nami, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thanks to both of you for your statements.
In Congress today, in the media, there's been a lot of discussion about the problem of lack of respect for women, harassment of women, both in the civilian world and in the military world, particularly focusing on the Yelp incident, which is reprehensible.
Anyone knows that.
And many people are arguing, particularly within the Beltway, that sexual harassment of women is a problem, and putting women in combat is the answer to that problem.
Do you agree with that?
And I suspect that you don't.
But what is the answer to the problem of lack of respect for women?
The fact that domestic violence seems rampant.
The idea that there seems to be a desensitization towards women being harmed and in pain.
What is the way to deal with that problem, both within the military society and in civilization at large and in general, from your perspective, Lisbon?
You asked about combating sexual harassment against women and would it help if women were in combat.
The only thing that helps any bad thing people do is values.
The rest is all commentary.
If a man is a decent man, he doesn't harass a woman.
It's not a terribly complex issue.
You have to raise good men.
It has nothing to do with whether women are in combat or not.
They'll harass them if they're in combat.
If they have bad values, they'll harass them if they're not in combat.
They're just serving them tea.
It's a somewhat simple.
There are very few simple issues in life.
This one is.
As a man, I could just tell you, I don't harass women because I was raised.
Everybody, including women, is created in God's image, and I'm a schmuck.
If I harass a woman, pardon my language, but that's the language we would have used around my house.
That is why I'm so schmuck.
That's what I would have been looked at if I would have maltreated a girl.
That's the end of the issue.
I was raised.
The girl says no.
She says no.
You go home.
I mean, it's just, it's terror.
It's not really complex stuff.
There's nothing to do with the Navy.
The guys who did what they did at Tennel Hook, the issue was they were drunk.
The issue there is a combination of values and alcohol.
Not Navy, not male bonding, and all the great sociological things that people come out with.
You get men who don't have a strong self-control, and you give them wine, and women are walking.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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