This is the script to my video on "Judeo-Christian Values", which you can watch here.

CONTENT WARNING: ANTISEMITISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA, AND THE ALT-RIGHT

TED CRUZ: The Judeo-Christian values that built this great nation!

DONALD TRUMP: The attacks on Judeo-Christian values!

NIGEL FARAGE: In standing up for our Judeo-Christian culture.

JORDAN PETERSON: The Judeo-Christian worldview—

BEN SHAPIRO: Judeo-Christian values—

COMMERCIAL: Gets mice right where they live!

DENNIS PRAGER: Have you ever heard the term "Judeo-Christian values"?

Sholem-aleichem, Dennis.

Gee, the right sure loves to throw around the term “Judeo-Christian values”, don’t they? They especially love to claim that it’s a pillar of Western Civilization, something that definitely exists, is definitely a singular cohesive civilization, and is definitely in danger from queer degenerate antifa leftists like myself. But what are “Judeo-Christian values”? Well, it’s a dog-whistle. Like, just to make that clear right off the bat. The whole point is to have a vague word that, for example, Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro can constantly bring up, but keep weaseling around any actual definition of so their audience can project their own values into place and have their own opinions mirrored back at them. When pressed, they just vaguely point at things like “The Bible” or “The Constitution” or “belief in a good and moral God” but refuse to elaborate, because if they get any less vague they might say something that conflicts with the goal of telling their viewers what they want to hear.

But among all the far-right grifters who throw the term around, there’s one man who’s brave enough to put his money where his mouth is, squat over the toilet, and pull an actual list of “Judeo-Christian values” right out of his ass! I am, of course, referring to celebrated author and pillar of Jewish scholarship, Dennis Prager!

So, just to be candid for a moment. I’m a leftist, Dennis Prager is on the far-right, the two of us are never going to see eye to eye. But despite all that, I’m not actually here to talk politics today. I’m here to talk about Jewish values. See, PragerU recently released one of their infamous five-minute videos, titled “What are Judeo-Christian Values?”, hosted by Dennis himself. A lot of the claims PragerU makes are nebulous at best and downright disinformation at worst, but today, I wanna give Dennis the benefit of the doubt and not just assume the worst. After all, Dennis has fought for Russian refuseniks, written several books about Judaism over the decades, has an entry in the Encyclopedia of Judaism, founded and runs his own synagogue, and has appeared on countless talk shows, written countless articles, and has spoken with people ranging from Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to Larry King. I’m sure he has plenty of credentials to back up his—

Oh.

Well, look, let’s be charitable. That’s the same level of degree that I have, so I can’t really talk. What I’m gonna do is try to engage with Dennis’s ideas. Specifically, I’m not going to argue with whether his ideas are good or bad. Like, I think they’re bad, but that’s not really relevant here. What’s relevant is not his claim that these are his values, but that they’re Jewish values. After all, that’s kinda the crux of the term “Judeo-Christian values”, isn’t it, this idea that these are shared values between Jews and Christians, so that’s what I want to explore. Dennis, the colour of your neshama is between you and haKadosh Baruch Hu. But your ass belongs to me. Welcome to the show, let’s do some analysis!

JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES
BY CHAIA ERAN
MUSIC BY KEVIN MACLEOD

Now, look. This isn’t a reaction video. I’ve already seen this video, and done a bunch of research, so if you were hoping for a PragerU cringe compilation, you’re in the wrong place. That being said, as loath as I am to do so, I’ve linked the YouTube version of Dennis’s video here. If you want to, like, watch that on double speed, I’d recommend doing that before coming back. I personally went to PragerU’s website, since it has a transcript and citations, but they’re the same video.

Alright, welcome back. In the interest of fairness, and so that people inclined to believe PragerU don’t just immediately click off, I’m deliberately not citing any leftist or even left-wing Jewish sources. I’m only going to cite classical Jewish texts, as sourced from Sefaria, an online library of Jewish texts, My Jewish Learning, a nondenominational website for education on Judaism, the Jewish Virtual Library, a Jewish encyclopedia run by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, and any sources that Dennis himself cites. I’ve also translated everything from the original Hebrew for you using the translations available on Sefaria. I’ll have all my sources cited at the bottom of the page, so you can check my work yourself if you want to. Let’s get started!

Dennis starts by quoting Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,

As the great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it: “The truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only… because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace… for which we all long.”

So we’re already off to a great start. The Iron Lady spends the whole speech talking about Christian values and Jesus, aside from this one quote:

The Christian religion—which, of course, embodies many of the great spiritual and moral truths of Judaism—is a fundamental part of our national heritage.

— Margaret Thatcher

After which she mentions the “Judaic-Christian tradition” exactly three times, including the time Dennis quoted, before spending the rest of the speech talking about Christianity some more. It’d be splitting hairs to point out the difference between “Judeo-Christian” and “Judaic-Christian”, so we’re gonna move on, but still, not a great start.

That is why traditionally religious Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews are aligned on almost every important moral issue.

Oh, that’s an interesting thing to claim. Does he have anything backing it up? As a matter of fact, he does have citations for this one. He points back to four Pew Research Center studies — one for Evangelical Protestants, one for Catholics, one for Mormons, and one for Jews. So, OK, that checks out, right? Well, let’s look a little closer.

First off, the study of Evangelical Protestants is just… demographic studies of Evangelical Protestants who are conservative. Like, the study explicitly clarifies that it’s already talking about conservatives here. You can’t use it to claim that Evangelicals are conservative, because it’s not measuring conservativism among Evangelicals, it’s just doing a study on Evangelicals who already are conservative. I also find it telling that Dennis refers to “traditionally religious Protestants”, while the study he cites refers specifically to Evangelicals.

In contrast, the study of Catholics is actually about political ideology among Catholics, and it indicates that 37% of American Catholics are conservative, 36% are moderates, 22% are liberals, and 5% are undeclared. Not exactly a conservative majority, is it? The study of Mormons does show they tend to be very conservative, though, so I’m not gonna go after Dennis for that one.

The most important one for this video is the study of Jews, which finds — surprise! — most Jews are liberal! The vast majority of American Jews (70%) vote Democrat, and over half describe their views as liberal. Stark contrast with the other groups, right? Looks like Dennis is just wrong, right? Well, here’s where Dennis pulls a sneaky little trick. See, he refers to “traditionally religious” Jews… and Orthodox Jews are a complete inverse of the rest of the American Jewish population, skewing heavily conservative.

Thing is, though, Orthodox Jews are only 9% of American Jewry, and there’s a whole discourse around the (false) idea that Orthodox Judaism is the “traditional” Jewish religion that’s beyond the scope of this video — tl;dr, all of the Jewish denominations have about equal claim to Jewish tradition. But Dennis’s views on that are pretty clear. He recently claimed in a Townhall article that “the Left” has “perverted” nearly all non-Orthodox synagogues, so he’s just… deliberately excluding 91% of American Jews, according to the Pew research study that he cited. Maybe something worth keeping in mind through the rest of this video, that when Prager talks about Jews, he’s talking about 9% of the American Jewish population.

And even then, he’s still wrong! Let’s get into his list of “10 Judeo-Christian values”. People like listicle videos, right? Let’s do one now!

NUMBER ONE

There is one God. That God is the God introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible, or as Christians came to refer to it, the Old Testament.

OK, we’re actually off to a pretty good start. This is, in fact, something most religious Jews believe! Good job, Dennis! Buuuuut, this is also something that Muslims believe, and Baháʼí, and Druze, and Samaritans, and every other Abrahamic religion. To claim it as a “Judeo-Christian” value is just kind of exclusionary. This one being a Jewish value is a truism, there’s not really much else to say on it, let’s move on.

NUMBER TWO

The Hebrew Bible introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are objective mathematical and scientific truths. Without God, there is no moral truth; only moral opinions.

Oh, no, you were doing so well! This is a view I’ve seen expressed a bunch, but it’s just not textually supported. Let’s take a look at two verses from the Talmud; Eruvin 100b:29 and Yoma 67b:8. In Eruvin 100b:29, according to the William Davidson Talmud’s translation,

Similarly, Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Even if the Torah had not been given, we would nonetheless have learned modesty from the cat, which covers its excrement, and that stealing is objectionable from the ant, which does not take grain from another ant, and forbidden relations from the dove, which is faithful to its partner, and proper relations from the rooster, which first appeases the hen and then mates with it.

If we look at Yoma 67b:8, the same translation gives us,

The Gemara cites another baraita related to the scapegoat. The Sages taught with regard to the verse: “You shall do My ordinances, and you shall keep My statutes to follow them, I am the Lord your God”, that the phrase: My ordinances, is a reference to matters that, even had they not been written, it would have been logical that they be written. They are the prohibitions against idol worship, prohibited sexual relations, bloodshed, theft, and blessing God, a euphemism for cursing the Name of God.

So, both of these passages seem to imply that there’s a kind of natural morality that’s intrinsic to nature and human logic that we’d have understood even if G-d had never given us the Torah. Nachmanides expounds on this as well in his commentary on Genesis 6:13, explaining that when G-d tells Noah that he’s decided to wipe out humanity because of “חָמָ֖ס”, translated in the JPS Chumash as “lawlessness”, it should be understood as follows, according to Charles B. Chavel’s translation:

VIOLENCE, that is, robbery and oppression. Now G-d gave Noah the explanation [that the flood was due to the fact that the “the earth is filled with] violence” and did not mention “the corruption of the way” [recorded in the preceding verse] because violence is a sin that is known and widely publicized. Our Rabbis have said that it was on account of the sin of violence that their fate was sealed. The reason for it is that the prohibition against violence is a rational commandment, there being no need for a prophet to admonish them against it. Besides, it is evil committed against both heaven and mankind. Thus He informed Noah of the sin for which the end is come — the doom is reached.

So, once more, we see the idea that there are prohibitions and laws that humans are expected to come to by their own rationality, even without a god to tell them that it’s wrong. As a final nail in the coffin, I want to draw on the Kuzari, a work by medieval poet Judah Halevi. The Kuzari isn’t a rabbinic work, and we don’t take laws from it, but it is an apologetic for Judaism — that’s apologetic in the religious sense, a defense of religious doctrine through argumentation and discourse. The Kuzari is framed as a Socratic dialogue between an unnamed rabbi and the king of the Khazars, where the rabbi explains Judaism to the king. In Kuzari 2:48, according to Hartwig Hirschfeld’s 1905 translation, the rabbi says,

The Rabbi: These are the rational laws, being the basis and preamble of the divine law, preceding it in character and time, and being indispensable in the administration of every human society. Even a gang of robbers must have a kind of justice among them if their confederacy is to last.

So, if you’re keeping track, that’s four sources — two Talmudic, one rabbinic, and one apologetic — that contradict Dennis’s claim. But what about Dennis’s citation? Well, it’s… another PragerU video. But that’s OK, because that video has sources, too. And if we check the citations for the same claims, we find… an interview in a Mormon magazine… with Dennis Prager… and a listicle on the Ten Commandments… in a Christian website… by Dennis Prager.

Oh, no, Denny, that’s not how this works.

NUMBER THREE

Because there are moral truths, good and evil are the same for all people.

OK, this is one of those vague ones. Dennis’s source for this one is the same as the last one, so I’m not going to waste too much time on trying to contradict it. All I’ll say is that even if moral truths do exist, that doesn’t necessitate that they’re the moral truths of the Tanach. Remember, Jewish thought already presupposes a natural human morality that precedes the revelation at Sinai.

NUMBER FOUR

God—not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote—is the source of our rights.

Now, look, the Tanach had a lot of ideas that were radical in its day, and had a lot of moral and ethical imperatives. But there’s nothing I could find to back this claim. Dennis’s citations are another PragerU video, this one by…

Oh, we’ll get to you, Benny Boy.

His other citation is… the American Declaration of Independence.

The American Declaration of Independence declares that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Unfortunately, it’s a complete non sequitur if we’re talking about Jewish values. None of the authors of the Declaration were Jewish. And because I know who Dennis is really talking to in this video, I’m going to go a step further. In 1796, the United States Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli, which was signed by President John Adams. Included in that treaty is Article 11, which states outright that the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. Citing the Declaration of Independence as a source of “Judeo-Christian values” is just completely irrelevant. It’s a secular document.

NUMBER FIVE

The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, Every human life is precious and therefore race is of no significance because God has no race.

So, this one’s tricky because he got the first bit right. The concept of B’tzelem Elokim, that humanity is created in G-d’s image, is a real and important Jewish value. It’s the basis for the Jewish conception of human rights — which doesn’t make Dennis correct on the previous point, by the way — and a strong counter to racism. But, when Dennis says it means “race is of no significance”, I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn’t mean it the way an antiracist would. By just looking at PragerU’s videos on race, including videos by Dennis Prager, we see arguments against critical race theory, against reparations for slavery, and against “playing the race card”. And his only source for this claim is Genesis, which doesn’t say anything about race.

I don’t want to go too far into this, since a) I don’t have the melanin to speak authoritatively on this topic, and b) it’s out of scope, but I’ll just say that classical Jewish texts don’t mention “race” in the modern sense at all, because it’s a modern social construct. I actually did a video earlier this year examining racial discourse as it relates to White Jews like myself and Dennis, so feel free to check that out if you’re interested, but otherwise, I’d recommend reading Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi to get a better view of American racism.

NUMBER SIX

The world is based on divine order, and order is made by distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, God and nature, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil.

So, look. There is a Jewish concept of distinction between the sacred and the mundane. That much is true. But Dennis doesn’t make that claim here, and I couldn’t find any source for these distinctions that Dennis is claiming. I searched, I really did, but I couldn’t find anything, and Dennis’s own source is just another PragerU video that doesn’t even mention this or make any reference to it at all. It looks like he’s just made this one up?

Now, I’m gonna take the next two together, because they’re a doozy, and also they’re related to each other.

NUMBER SEVEN AND EIGHT BECAUSE HOLY FUCK

Man is not basically good. Christians speak of “original sin” in referring to man's nature; Jews cite what God said in Genesis: “The will of man's heart is evil from his youth.” Both beliefs are diametrically opposed to the naive modern belief that man is basically good. And they lead to the same conclusion: we need God-based rules to keep us from our natural inclinations. […] Therefore, our natural inclinations are a very poor moral guide. As religious Jews and Christians put it, don’t follow your heart. A lot of terrible things have been done—and are being done now—by people thinking their hearts are better guides than Judeo-Christian values.

This… this isn’t Jewish. This is Christian original sin. Dennis’s only sources are a Christian theologian and the Genesis verse he cites. It is, however, something Dennis himself has been proclaiming for a long time, so it seems like it’s a personal bugbear of his. Nevertheless, I’m going to cite the late Rabbi Dr. Reuven Hammer (Z”L), former President of the International Rabbinical Assembly, in his book Entering the High Holy Days, as quoted by My Jewish Learning, where he discusses the Jewish view of sin. Jewish rabbinic tradition holds that the human soul is born pure and free of sin. The Jewish idea of chet, commonly translated as sin, is that of missing the mark, of making mistakes and straying from yourself, and the Jewish idea of teshuva, translated as repentance but literally meaning “returning”, is that of returning to yourself and making up for your mistakes.

When Judaism does talk about natural inclinations, it actually talks about two natural inclinations: The yetzer hara, or the so-called “evil inclination”, and the yetzer hatov, the good inclination. According to Avot D’Rabbi Natan 16:2, while the “evil” inclination is instilled in people from birth, the good inclination begins to develop around age 13 or so — in other words, around the time that children start to mature into teenagers and develop a moral consciousness. This is why the concept of bar mitzvah is a thing in Judaism. It’s the age at which a person is developing their good inclination, and so is ready to be responsible for their own actions. Children under the age of bar mitzvah aren’t held responsible for their actions because they haven’t yet developed that moral consciousness, so their parents are responsible for them instead.

And even then, Judaism stresses the necessity of the “evil” inclination. It’s not some sort of demonic temptation, it’s just the drive towards self-interest and pleasure, things humans need. If you single-mindedly act towards self-interest, then yeah, you’ll probably end up hurting people. But that’s why we also have the good inclination, which is just as inherent to humans. And according to Rabbi Dr. David Mevorach Seidenberg’s translation of Bereishit Rabbah 9:7,

Rabbi Nahman said in Rabbi Samuel's name: 'Behold, it was good' refers to the Good Desire; 'And behold, it was very good' refers to the Evil Desire. (It only says 'very good' after man was created with both the good and bad inclinations, in all other cases it only says 'and God saw that it was good') Can then the Evil Desire be very good? That would be extraordinary! But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children; and thus said Solomon: 'Again, I considered all labour and all excelling in work, that it is a man's rivalry with his neighbor.'

Jewish morality is about striking a balance between the two inclinations, not denying the evil inclination entirely.

NUMBER NINE

Human beings have free will—and are therefore responsible for how they behave. In the secular world, free will does not exist because all human behavior is the result of biology and environment. And if there is no free will, people are not responsible for what they do—good or bad.

This one’s just bad. Dennis cites a PragerU video again, but it’s not even relevant. He’s right about Judaism, which does believe in human souls and free will, but he’s… just wrong about secularism. There are plenty of secular philosophical arguments both for and against determinism. This is just a cheap strawman.

NUMBER TEN

The Ten Commandments. They are the core of Judeo-Christian values. In fact, if everyone lived just by the Ten Commandments, we wouldn’t need armies or even police.

Oh, this one is actually interesting. See, the Ten Commandments are definitely important — we stand when they’re recited on Shavuot — but they’re also not a part of the daily service, and that’s for a specific reason. Berakhot 12a:5 in the Talmud explains why — that is, the Babylonian Talmud. Berakhot 1:5:4 of the Jerusalem Talmud goes into even further detail. Let’s look at them now.

So, Berakhot 12a:5 says,

Rav Yehuda said that Shmuel said: Even in the outlying areas, outside the Temple, they sought to recite the Ten Commandments in this manner every day, as they are the basis of the Torah, but they had already abolished recitation of the Ten Commandments due to the grievance of the heretics, who argued that the entire Torah, with the exception of the Ten Commandments, did not emanate from God. If the Ten Commandments were recited daily, that would lend credence to their claim, so their recitation was expunged from the daily prayers.

So, there were some “heretics”, whoever they were, claiming that only the Ten Commandments came from Sinai, and not the whole Torah. If we look at Heinrich W. Guggenheimer’s translation of the Jerusalem Talmud’s version of Berakhot, we see an elaboration in 1:5:4 that clarifies,

Rav Mattanah and Rebbi Samuel ben Naḥman both say that it would have been logical to require that the Ten Commandments should be recited every day. Why does one not recite them? Because of the arguments of the Christians, that they should not say that only these were given to Moses at Sinai.

There’s a little note in the Guggenheimer translation of the Jerusalem Talmud that says that the Hebrew term “מִּין” always refers to Christians. That on its own may not be sufficient, but look, Dennis helps us out!

So, the writers of the Talmud worked very hard to lower the importance of the Ten Commandments down to the same level as the rest of the Torah. In the medieval period, Maimonides, one of the most famous rabbis of all time, took it a step further by arguing against standing for the Ten Commandments on Shavuot, and actually declaring it heretical to claim any one part of the Torah as more important than the rest (Pe’er HaDor Teshuvot HaRambam 263). So, no, the Ten Commandments are not the core of Jewish values, that’s a Christian belief, the core of Jewish values is the entire Torah.

As for Dennis’s claim that just following the Ten Commandments would remove the need for armies and police… well, that misunderstands a lot of sociopolitical ideas about the actual purpose of militaries and policing that I don’t particularly want to get into here. Suffice to say we can’t just Kumbaya our way out of the military-industrial complex or the relation between capital and policing.

Wow, it feels good writing listicles! You don’t have to worry about actually transitioning smoothly from topic to topic or writing a compelling narrative, you can just slap things together willy-nilly! I can see why Dennis likes this so much, it doesn’t take any rhetorical effort at all.

Now, Dennis makes two more claims about “Judeo-Christian values” that I want to dive into and dissect. The first is the claim that

No religions in the world share a common revelation the way Judaism and Christianity do. That common revelation is the Hebrew Bible. The only two religions that share that Bible, or any sacred work, are Judaism and Christianity.

And this one’s just factually incorrect. Islam, Baháʼí, Druzism, Samaritanism, Rastafarianism, and Mandaeism are all also Abrahamic religions based on the Tanach. But the more interesting claim he makes is that, The two religions need each other. See, he says that Christianity needs Judaism because, Without the Old Testament, there is no New Testament. And that’s true. He claims that virtually every Christian moral principle derives from the Tanach, and cites a few of them, and he’s all correct there, Christians need Judaism for their faith to make sense. But then he claims that,

At the same time, Jews need Christians. It was overwhelmingly Christians who carried knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to the world.

No.

No, Dennis.

Judaism is a semi-closed religion.

We accept converts, but we don’t proselytize. Christian missionaries don’t help Jews at all — in fact, Christian proselytizing has been incredibly brutal to Jews over the millennia.

Dennis’s source on this is that paper by Adam Gregerman, but I read the paper, and I couldn’t find any reference to this claim anywhere in it. So, I did some digging… and it turns out this video is an adaptation of a listicle Dennis wrote back in February for Townhall, a far-right magazine originally founded by the Heritage Foundation, and currently run by Salem Media Group, a Christian organization that also owns the radio network where Dennis’s radio show is hosted. In that original paper, he cites Maimonides for this claim. And the thing is, he’s actually right! Sort of. It turns out it’s a little more complicated than Dennis makes it out to be.

So, in Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 11:6-11:9,

—and I must stress here that THE VIEWS OF MAIMONIDES ARE NOT THE VIEWS OF THIS SHOW—

Maimonides claims that, and I’m not gonna quote directly because it is long, but the translation I’m using is Eliyahu Touger’s; Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and was executed, and belief in Jesus as Messiah has caused Jews to be slain, the Torah altered, and the majority of the world to serve a false god, but that G-d has a plan for everything, and that the ultimate purpose of both Christianity and Islam are to prepare the way for the arrival of the real Messiah, since they’ll spread their view of Messiah, Torah, and mitzvah, and Christians and Muslims will have all of their beliefs and views, and then when the real Messiah shows up all the Christians and Muslims will realize they were wrong… which I’m pretty sure isn’t what Dennis is trying to say.

Now, I could end here, since that’s the end of Dennis’s video, but he cited another PragerU video by Ben Shapiro about “Judeo-Christian values”, so I want to very quickly look at that one.

Ben Shapiro is a bit sharper than Dennis, choosing to wind around the term “Judeo-Christian values” without giving any concrete examples. He talks about how the reason “the West” has been so successful is because of an embrace of both Greek reason and “Judeo-Christian” revelation. He’s so vague about it, though, that there’s nothing there to concretely engage with. I just wanna look at his sources, see what his claims about “Judeo-Christian values” are based on. He cites Genesis for B’tzelem Elokim again, then cites… the Vatican. Specifically, a document by the Vatican titled “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible”. It’s written entirely from a Christian perspective, so that’s not super great. Ben Shapiro’s final source on “Judeo-Christian values”, which he cites extensively, is an article in the National Review titled “How the West Changed the World for the Better”, written by… Ben Shapiro!

I can’t stress enough just how dogshit these people are at citation. It’s all circular links that eventually lead to just citing themselves — there are a few moments where a video’s citation leads to the same video the citation is on! Notably, the Shapiro video here was cited as the source of the claim that “God is the source of our rights,” something Shapiro never actually claims in this video. Even if Ben Shapiro’s video was reliably sourced (which it’s not, he’s pulling solely from Christian sources and himself) it still wouldn’t actually back up this claim that God being the source of our rights is a Jewish value.

There are a few points where Benny and Denny do actually cite Jewish sources, specifically the Jewish Virtual Library, but it’s always to access their English translation of the Tanach, and never any of their actual articles on Judaism… except for one time. There’s exactly one citation, in a video on the Ten Commandments, that cites an actual article in the JVL about ethical monotheism… written by Dennis Prager.

So… yeah. Very few of Ben or Dennis’s purported “Judeo-Christian values” have any basis in Jewish tradition, and the ones that do are completely uncontroversial Judaism 101, like “belief in G-d” or “B’tzelem Elokim”. But that’s because the term “Judeo-Christian values” as the right uses it is a dogwhistle that serves two purposes. The first is to slap “Judeo” onto the front of Fundamentalist Christian beliefs to try and make themselves look more diverse than they actually are — and to tokenize Jewish people like Prager and Shapiro to do it.

The second purpose is Islamophobic in nature. If you wanted to talk about the things these religions actually have in common, you’d use the term “Abrahamic”. But that term includes Islam, since the Quran also derives concepts from the Tanach and the New Testament, and Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians do, and so they use “Judeo-Christian” instead to deliberately exclude Muslims from Abrahamic interfaith discourse.

The really infuriating part is, they should both know better! Dennis was raised Modern Orthodox, and he wrote multiple books about Judaism in the 70s and 80s with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, and Ben Shapiro is a practicing Orthodox Jew! This is just disingenuous pandering to Evangelicals, and they both know it—

There’s something very important that we just skipped over.

By arguing with Dennis over what “Jewish values” are, we’ve legitimated his way of thinking that there is a “right” way to do Judaism. And look, full disclosure, I’m a Masorti Jew, I consider halacha to be binding upon me. If we remain in the framework that a singular, unchanging halacha is binding, then yes, we could argue that Dennis Prager’s interpretation isn’t textually supported. But that’s already presupposing his framework for Judaism as the only valid framework. Ultimately, what Judaism is — what constitutes it, and what its values are — is determined by us, the Jews. And we are not good at agreeing on things. The Talmudic sages, Nachmanides, Maimonides; they all said a lot of stuff that we don’t hold to anymore, too. There’s always room for reinterpretation and personal choice, and to ignore that, to declare that Dennis is wrong because of authoritative texts, is a mouse trap. It’s playing his game.

I made this video because I wanted to show that even when presupposing Dennis’s framework of a singular binding halacha based on classical Jewish texts, he’s still not correct, but that is still letting his ideas about how Judaism fundamentally works into my head. Ultimately, this is the fundamental contradiction of Dennis Prager. He believes that there is one universal form of Judaism that all Jews should follow. But at the same time, he’s made a bunch of claims that are directly refuted by classical Jewish sources. So, Dennis, I have to ask, which is it? Do you believe that every Jewish interpretation of Judaism is valid, which is what you’d logically have to believe for your claims about Judeo-Christian values to avoid textual scrutiny, or do you believe, as you claim, that there is only one correct way to be Jewish?

The correct answer, of course, is that Dennis is acting in bad faith. He’d rather not have to reconcile the contradiction between his own conflicting views, preferring to set up an ideological mouse trap to ensnare anyone who tries to contradict him, because you can’t dispute his claims about Judaism without falling into his view about the very nature of Judaism. It’s troll logic, and you can’t argue with troll logic.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”

There is, I think, still value in deconstructing Dennis’s arguments, otherwise I wouldn’t have made this video in the first place. But there’s more to deconstruction than just debunking. You have to examine the frame of the argument too; ask yourself what questions you’re skipping over, and what you’re implicitly agreeing to by engaging, otherwise you might just find yourself…

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