Rabbi Daniel Lapin's podcast

A guard at the notorious San Quentin penitentiary near San Francisco takes issue with my overly broad characterization last week. Another California corrections officer comments on my preference for fines, flogging and execution over incarceration. A Columbian family writes from Singapore to where they moved from Malaysia telling of how they overcame dark times and broke through to prosperity. Tha...

Who cares what men musicians look like. We discuss only their music. But when lady musicians are dressed a little provocatively, even a little sexily, we'll comment on their music and also on their appearance. Is this wrong? Is this "sexism" whatever that means? There's a growing group of attractive young female concert pianists who no longer perform in long gowns in muted colors. Few are more not...

Okay, for all those of you who've been eagerly awaiting the day I criticize President Donald Trump, today is your day! Listen to the phrase in the State of The Union Speech I revile and repudiate! "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before." Well, I am not at all proud of that. And neither should you be. The president and his speechwriters were pandering...

Rabbi Daniel Lapin and his wife Susan take a lighthearted look at movies. Before World War 2, about 1/3% of movies released were what we would call "horror movies". By 1968 over 2% of movies were horror movies, by 2000 it was 4%, and by 2015 it was 12%. By then Zombies were taking over the (entertainment) world. To date, Hollywood has produced 1,000 more zombie movies than cowboy movies. The walki...

How to prepare your children to be able to say "No!" What are our three main appetites & how do they differ from one other? Why do so many smart, accomplished, powerful men who know better, act so badly towards women? The Torah prohibits Jews from eating pork, yet it is just as healthy as beef. So why are pigs, and other delicious dishes like crabs, lobsters, oysters, rabbits and snails prohibited...

If you have a few dollars, well, you didn't MAKE that money—you TOOK it. This according to the economics professors who teach your children and help them form their worldviews. Do you patronize companies that give some of their profit to charity? I explain why they would be acting more morally by reducing the price of the goods you purchase. After all, why is it the company's job to take additiona...

Here's a tough one to swallow: Morality as we know it applies to individuals, not to nations! The United Nations is nothing but an illusion. An illusion promoted by some pretty horrid people, to be sure; but an illusion nonetheless. The International Court in The Hague? Puhleez, it's a joke. You can ignore it. Everyone else does. If you don't like what Russia is doing (whatever that is supposed to...

Guess who's building the Argentina-Chile tunnel in order to lock up the world's supply of Lithium (ion batteries). Yes, I'm talking about your mobile phone—the one you love so much! It was in 1956 that we saw one of the first movies to depict a Christian missionary negatively. Guess who owns Kenya's new railway. And Kenya's port of Mombasa (which like Somalia and Yemen, was also named in Hebrew)....

If you've read my book, Thou Shall Prosper-The Ten Commandments for Making Money , then you already know why Jews are disproportionately good with money. You've probably already adopted those timeless truths into your own financial life to good effect. But none of that explains why over 80% of American comedians of the past 80 years are Jewish. While we're talking laughter, why are the wicked vill...

What is the semi-addictive behavior in which most of us engage to our own detriment? To what activity do most of us devote a shockingly high number of hours each week for which we get zero benefit? What is worse, this activity not only brings no benefit but it actually causes damage to us. If evil enemies wanted to harm the United States of America and render it weak both economically and militari...

Why the Donna Reed Show helped marriages while The Gilmore Girls hurt it. How boys started reneging on the social contract to become men back during the 1960s. Till then, boys sought to grow into men who would marry and who would cherish and protect their wives. Then, in what will turn out to be history's most remarkable case of mass arrested development, little boys grew into big boys and big boy...

Culture is not the same as civilization. There are thousands of cultures but only one civilization. Banks & bathrooms in Beijing, Bombay, and Bangkok grew to resemble such institutions in Boston, Birmingham, and Berlin not the other way around. Along with millions of others who voted with their feet, you and I also prefer civilization to any of the countless cultures we could have lived in. The pr...

Numbers are your portal to progress. What happened to England when all Jews were expelled? What happened to England when they returned? Start devoting a few hours every week to improving your numerical literacy. Stop telling yourself you can't do math. Nothing too complicated, just start on becoming more familiar with numbers than you are. In Hebrew all five verbs for counting each also mean arist...

By far, the majority of people around you understand money as well as they understand magnetic resonance imaging. Which is to say, not much! As a not very successful fisherman in the cool, deep waters of British Columbia, I learned that you can't possibly put salmon on your grill without understanding salmon. Similarly, you can't put money in your bank without understanding money. And putting mone...

Men are hardwired to want to make their wives happy. We genuinely are happier when our wives are happy. And we are miserable when our wives cry. The problem is that most of us men are pretty clueless as to how to make wives happy. And what makes it even harder is that wives never want to tell husbands how to make them happy. While not disparaging gifts, remembering important dates, and breakfast i...

Conservatives frequently misunderstand the battleground. They try to refute beliefs with facts. Won't work! Never has; never will. Crusaders will always defeat accountants. Believers will always defeat policy wonks. The committed will always defeat the complacent. Remember when the Moors invaded Spain? Well, one afternoon in the year 720, a brave Catholic priest bravely confronted the Moslem mob s...

I always thought that the fashion industry was just decadent, but apparently not. Clothing possesses a profoundly spiritual aspect. Most male birds like peacocks and cardinals are strikingly colorful while the female looks dull. However, last time I was at a charity banquet, the men were all bland and drab in black suits and white shirts while the women were resplendent in every color of the rainb...

Welcome to the church of Secular Fundamentalism. Many, and probably most American cities dump their carefully collected "recyclables" into the local landfill! That's right! After you laboriously separate your pizza boxes and beer cans from your papaya skins and T-Bone steak left-overs, after you arduously rinse out spaghetti sauce jars and baked bean cans, and after you religiously do all this and...

If Americans in favor of abortion knew some truths about the abortion industry, would they change their minds? Is that fear causing suppression of the new Gosnell movie, " Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer "? Kermit Gosnell was a cruel and callous murderer operating an abortion mill staffed by unqualified teenagers. Why wasn't he subject to the health inspections that even dent...

We're all fallible outside our areas of expertise, even famous heart-surgeons and billionaires. Why many bright celebrities who predict that tech will make work obsolete are foolish. Why many clever pundits who predict that men will come to prefer robots to women are foolish. The only way the government can give some people money is by first taking it from others. It does so by imposing confiscato...

Virtually all political debate, conflict, and hostility today is between the state religion of the American government and ruling classes, namely Secular Progressive Fundamentalism and the more conservative outlook springing from the Bible-based Judeo-Christian tradition. This religion, SPF, has also been embraced by the European Economic Union and by almost all universities and educational system...

Don't be overwhelmed by today's events in your business, family, or our politics. Seek understanding of the original causes. A tyrannical state, through hysterically emotional courtrooms, ruthlessly ambitious and corrupt prosecutors, and political-wind-sniffing judges, frequently destroys the lives of law-abiding American citizens. Sarah Good and 4 other innocent women were executed in Massachuset...

"I do want to get married. I just haven't found the right girl yet" he said to me. In this show you'll hear what I said to him. You will probably never guess when the right time is to start your child's moral education. These are two of the questions I discuss in this show which is a speech I delivered in Dallas last Sunday. I speculate on why I sound different when I speak to a live audience from...

Isn't technology wonderful? Sure; it's given us marvelous medicines, instantaneous communication & spectacular entertainment. But it's also given us hackers who can steal our identities, bosses who expect responses from us at midnight, and a cornucopia of pornography. In other words, technology increases the possibility of good but it also amplifies the bad. Good societies use it to spread informa...

Why you could have once watched me demolishing a huge ants nest. Why an utterly chaste nun in Florida contracts an STD while hedonistic people in California seem to cavort concupiscently with impunity? How even untrue ideas spread across groups of people and through entire societies with almost virus-like effectiveness. How a Belgian rogue plagiarized a brilliant South African scholar. If the Inte...