The Media Line: Dennis Prager Responds to Candace Owen’s Provocative Remarks  (Exclusive to TML)

Exclusive to TML: Dennis Prager Responds to Candace Owen’s Provocative Remarks  

Renowned historian, Dennis Prager speaks with Felice Friedson about Owen’s latest inflammatory comments  

By Felice Friedson / The Media Line 

Candace Owens, a right-wing political commentator and author, has been espousing inflammatory positions on numerous topics about Jews and Israel. I sat with Dennis Prager to hear his response to the recent wave of malicious statements. Owens worked for PragerU for one year, in 2021. Prager addressed a 15-page letter to her in 2024, expressing his concerns about her political positions and activism but received no reply. The in-person interview was followed up with more detailed questions in writing as The Media Line sought to understand the sequence of events, and Prager’s interpretation of the current situation. 

In a pointed interview, Prager dismantles Candace Owens’ disturbing claims—from alleged Jewish dominance in the slave trade to conspiracy theories implicating Jews in global conflicts and even Charlie Kirk’s assassination—while warning of the dangers of such claims for Jews, Christians, and even the US Republican party.  

Q: Candace Owens has been at the forefront of the instigation n of hate against Jews. This time, she has come out with an attack list against the Jewish people in general, and Ben Shapiro specifically, saying that people who describe themselves as Talmudic Jews, “think we are animals, that they have a right to own us, make us worship them, lie to us, sue us, take everything we have and deceive us.” 

She recently urged her YouTube audience to study what the Talmud says, claiming that the Talmud encouraged Jews to be “contract lords” and that Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade. She referenced Der Talmudjude, (The Talmudic Jew) written by August Rohling, who was an anti-Jewish German Catholic theologian who invoked the old blood libel that Jews consume human blood in murder rituals.

Dennis, as a Jewish historian, who knows Candace Owens, what do you say? Why is she dredging up conspiracy theories and what impact is this having? 

A: I studied in Yeshiva for 14 years. I never encountered any one of these Talmudic ideas during my education. None of this is normative Judaism, even for those who study the Talmud. The only time I’ve ever heard of any of these ideas has been in the context of someone citing them in attempt to create hatred of Jews. 

People need to understand that there are almost 2.5 million words in the Talmud. To put that into context, the entire Hebrew Bible has 305,000 words. There are nearly 1 million words in Shakespeare’s collected works. 

The Talmud contains many laws, but it contains far more opinions of rabbis in the first centuries which were written down and therefore preserved, many of which were arguments, with rabbis on opposing sides of any given issue. Most of it is obscure and known to very few Jews, rarely studied, and not binding upon Jews.  

Furthermore, many such claims about what is in the Talmud are either taken out of context, distorted by mistranslation, or are outright fabrications. The words specifically cited here fall into one or more of these categories. In addition, it needs to be understood that some of the remarks uttered by a few rabbis over the course of centuries were made in the context of hostility toward Jews as expressed by anti-Jewish laws enacted during the late Roman Empire. As with everything, context matters.  

My assumption about why Candace is raising these age-old allegations against Jews is that she believes they hold merit. But just as she urged her viewers to read about “what Jews really think,” I would urge those who follow Candace’s book recommendation to also read Rohling’s critics before forming your opinion about his reliability. Rohling’s lack of scholarship was exposed during the pre-trial preparations by the defense in his 1883 libel suit against Rabbi Josef Bloch by experts who exposed his inability to read Aramaic/Hebrew Talmudic texts and his fabricated quotes, forcing him to withdraw his lawsuit. 

Q: Equally disturbing, Candace Owens called on black Americans to turn their angst against Jews, instead of holding grudges against white Americans. Will her race card work? 

Candace, addressing fellow black people, said Ben Shapiro, based on his self-description as a Talmudic Jew, not only hates her, but “he hates you, too, white men; he hates all black people.”  

She appears to be saying the book she read about “Talmudic values” said the Talmud teaches hatred of all non-Jews, that they’re to be viewed as inferiors. She went on to say it was not so much white people who enslaved and sold black people, but rather Jews who were responsible for the slave trade.  

She cited no source for this other than to say, “they’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it.” I hope people—black, white, Jewish, and Christian—take up her challenge and do some reading on the subject.  

Two thoroughly researched resources on this topic are “Jews and the American Slave Trade,” by Saul S. Friedman and “Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight,” by Eli Faber. In 1995, the American History Association felt compelled to issue a statement condemning the misuse of history to claim Jews were disproportionately involved in the slave trade. The full statement can be seen here:  

https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/aha-council-issues-policy-resolution- 

about-jews-and-the-slave-trade/ 

 

But even if the claim that Jews were predominate in the slave trade was historically true, what would be the point of raising it now, other than to make modern-day black people hate modern-day Jews? That seems to be Candace’s point: “Your quarrel is not with white men”—the implication being it’s with Jews, who were responsible for the slave trade.  

On what grounds do today’s black people have any quarrel with today’s Jews? Besides the obvious immorality of holding people alive today responsible for the actions of people who came before them, no non-black group in America fought as hard for civil rights for black people as did Jews. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, near the end of his life, that “probably more than any other ethnic group, the Jewish community has been sympathetic and has stood as an ally to the Negro in his struggle for justice.” That remains true of America’s Jews to this day. I’ve never heard Candace give Jews credit for that. 

Q: She is also playing a religion card, claiming Jews are pitting Christians against Christians and Christians vs. Muslims? Who can set the record straight? 

A: Candace implored her viewers to “wake up to these people who believe that they are contract lords … wake up to who publishes these books and who keeps us warring with one another.” It’s unclear to me what she’s referring to here—she didn’t say what books “these books” are, but presumably they’re written by Jews. I don’t know what books Jews have written that cause “warring” between Jews and Christians or Christians and Muslims. Perhaps that was a reference to the books of the Talmud and other ancient Jewish literature.  

Her reference to “contract lords” appears to come from another comment she made in the same video (her podcast Episode 283), in which she spoke to Ben Shapiro and “your people,” meaning Jews, saying what he and other Jews “really believe in is ‘ba’al b’rith’”—not a Hebrew phrase I’ve ever heard— but one that literally means “owners of the covenant.”  

I think this is a misunderstanding on Candace’s part, similar to the way in which she once misunderstood the Muslim and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem as areas of the city those groups were mandated to live in and/or were excluded from. She uses a similar, but not identical, term—“contract” rather than “covenant”—and based on what she said in that episode, appears to believe it means Jews think they are “contract lords”—such that people [presumably meaning non-Jews] “are not allowed to violate contracts [presumably with Jews] or you [the Jews] will ruin them.”  

The Hebrew phrase I’m familiar with is “b’nai b’rith,” and means “sons of the covenant”—a reference to the covenant God made in Genesis with Abraham and his descendants who became the Jews. It has nothing to do with contracts between people. (Incidentally, the Talmud requires Jews to be ethical in their contracts and other business dealings with non-Jews.) 

To the extent that Christians are pitted against one another, I don’t see how Jews are in any way responsible. Christians have had internecine disputes—sometimes violently so—for centuries. And to the extent Christians and Muslims are pitted against one another, I don’t see how Jews are responsible for that, either. Muslim societies have been hostile places for Christians throughout much of Islamic history. What’s going on in Nigeria, for example, with Muslims massacring Christians on a regular basis (~62,000 since 2000), does not in any way involve Jews.  

Q: When someone hears Owens accuse Erika Kirk and other Turning Point USA leaders of involvement in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, how do you challenge her claims? 

A: I have yet to see evidence that anyone Charlie knew, much less anyone he loved, was in any way involved in his killing.  

Q: Is Candace Owens an antisemite?  

I can only do what we all can, evaluate her public statements. First, I must define what constitutes antisemitism. An antisemite is someone who hates Jews for being Jews, and/or someone who believes the only country in the world that should be destroyed is the Jewish one.  

I don’t believe Candace has said anything that indicates she hates Jews just for being Jews. It’s not fully clear to me, based on her public statements to this point, whether Candace opposes the existence of the State of Israel. She has said some things that imply that is her view, such as her claim that the Zionist movement in the early part of the 20th century was led by members of a sex cult called Frankism, and that protection of pedophiles is one of Israel’s purposes, as well as its current practice. That suggests illegitimacy.   

It’s clear that she fiercely opposes the current government of Israel because she believes it has committed war crimes, including “genocide” (which I’ve never heard her define), in its battle against Hamas in Gaza since October 7. Because I don’t believe Hamas, I think she’s wrong on the facts, but I don’t have a reason to think she doesn’t genuinely believe the claims made by Hamas—through the Gaza Ministry of Health—about the death toll in the wake of the vicious October 7 attack. Having said that, I don’t know why she believes Hamas is a credible source of information about Israel. That strikes me as illogical. 

What is also not clear to me is why she doesn’t assign moral blame primarily, or at least equally, to Hamas for a) starting the war in the first place and b) using tactics (taking hostages, firing from civilian infrastructure, wearing civilian clothes and mingling amongst civilians) designed to draw fire at  innocent civilians, particularly children, resulting in the images that horrify me as much as they do her. I have not heard her condemn Hamas for getting Palestinian children killed. I have not heard her condemn Hamas for proudly targeting civilians, including children, in Israel.  

Even if she is not herself antisemitic, (she says she is not), it is unquestionable (based on the social media comments I have seen), that she is leading many of her followers to antisemitism—to see Jews as manipulating the world, especially America.  

Her portrayal of Israeli callousness is unwarranted and unfair. Most Israelis do not share the attitudes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich toward the Gazan population; most Israelis, and Jews, generally, view the deaths of innocents, especially children, the way Golda Meir did: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” 

Q: She worked for PragerU. What changed her? 

A: I can only surmise the answer to this question based on what she has said. She believes she was subjected to pro-Israel propaganda, which she accepted because she had no reason not to, and has since had her eyes opened to what she now sees as the “reality”—that Israel is “demonic” (her word). She believes this is uniquely true of Israel because she believes it was founded by members of a Jewish sex cult called Frankism, it was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and, until the ceasefire, it was attempting to eradicate the population of Gaza.  

She has publicly said a “real holocaust” has taken place in Gaza at the hands of Israel, which has engaged in “planned ethnic cleansing” and the “mass murder of children” of its Arab population so that Israel can take over the land. 

She has not said much about the actions of other countries, past or present, engaged in a hot war. Israel is not the only country whose munitions have caused devastation to civilian infrastructure in the course of fighting a war. In contrast to Israel, for which she has presented no evidence that there has been deliberate targeting of civilians (in fact, the opposite: Israel has repeatedly warned the civilian population to move out of the way of its fire), I haven’t heard her refer to the Muslims in Nigeria who have been deliberately slaughtering tens of thousands of Christian men, women, and children in a campaign to eradicate the Christian population from their midst as “demonic.”  

I haven’t heard her comment on what I consider to be the demonic tactic used by the Soviet Union in targeting children in Afghanistan by dropping toys stuffed with explosives so that when a child found one and picked it up, her arm would be blown off. I don’t think she has accused Britain of being “demonic” for the bombing of civilians in Dresden, the United States of being “demonic” for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, or fighting the Vietnam War, or, more recently, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all of which maimed and killed massive numbers of civilians, including children.  

The point is, when only one nation of all those in the world is singled out as “demonic” for war casualties, it seems there’s a different standard for that one and it’s troubling. Once someone begins to see Jews and/or their state as a problem for the world, they tend to see that dynamic at work everywhere. I don’t know whether Candace has fully arrived at that point, but she appears to be headed in that direction.  

Q: On Sept. 4, 2024, you sent her a long letter concerning her diatribes. You have yet to hear back? 

A: I had a phone conversation with Candace three weeks after sending that letter, just before I made it public. She told me it was her intent to respond point by point but, to my knowledge, she has never done so.  

Q: What are the dangers posed by such criticisms of Israel by Owens, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and others for Jews, Christians (particularly regarding their support for Israel), and even the Republican Party amid conservative divisions? 

A: The danger for all of us—Jews, Christians, Republicans—is that we’ll divide over false premises, the primary one here being that Jews and/or Israel are behind much of the world’s problems and fracture a coalition that is critical to maintaining America as we’ve known it.  

The most important thing for all of us to do is engage in civil dialogue, carefully define our terms so that we’re all using the same words to mean the same things, and, in good faith, hash out what are the facts, what are the false claims and assumptions, cite sources, and clarify over what we differ and why.  

Text of Dennis Prager’s 2024 Letter to Candace Owens 

This should be a link to the following URL: https://www.prageru.com/dennis-pragers-letter-to-candace-owens