A conservative curriculum has been approved for public schools in eight states. What does it teach about Israel and Jews?
PragerU was co-founded by Dennis Prager, the ‘Jewish Billy Graham’
Dennis Prager speaks at a panel in Pasadena, California, in 2017. Photo by Michael Schwartz/Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer August 21, 2025
A conservative educational nonprofit that touts its Judeo-Christian, pro-Israel bonafides is now the creator behind a White House museum exhibit, a test for incoming teachers in Oklahoma, and approved curriculum in at least eight states’ public schools.
The curriculum from Prager University includes crafting Israel’s Iron Dome out of a juice pouch and straw in a lesson designed for kindergarten through second grade, animated videos telling biblical stories, and a video for sixth graders titled “How To Be a Rational Patriot” that says, “It’s not fine to tell people that America is evil.”
PragerU, named for its co-founder Dennis Prager, built its brand on viral videos promoting conservative viewpoints. What began as edgy social media content has now earned the support of government officials.
In June, the Department of Education partnered with PragerU to create a White House exhibit featuring what appear to be AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers. Last month, Oklahoma’s superintendent announced the state would give incoming teachers from New York and California an “America First” test developed by PragerU to keep “social justice warriors” out of its schools.
‘The Jewish Billy Graham’
The top three executives at PragerU — co-founders Dennis Prager and Allen Estrin and CEO Marissa Streit — are all Jewish.
Prager, a 77-year-old talk show host on a Christian radio station, was raised in a Modern Orthodox household and attended yeshivas until the age of 19. He got his start as a national spokesperson for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, raising awareness for Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate to Israel, and leading the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, a summer retreat for Jews in Simi, California.
Prager soon became a fixture on Los Angeles local radio, known for his social conservatism and critiques of secularism — qualities that earned him the nickname “the Jewish Billy Graham,” a reference to the famed televangelist. In 2009, he co-founded PragerU with Estrin as a counterweight to what they saw as the excesses of the left in higher education. They originally considered creating a brick-and-mortar university, but settled on producing short-form videos instead. (PragerU is not an accredited university and does not confer any degrees.)
Some of the nonprofit’s biggest donors include brothers Dan and Farris Wilks, hydraulic fracking billionaires who have been closely linked to the Christian nationalist movement in Texas.
Over the years, Prager — both the person and the platform — has been the subject of much controversy. In 2006, Prager said the first Muslim elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, should give up his post for wanting to be sworn in on a Quran instead of a Bible — a comment that drew a rebuke from the Holocaust Memorial Council, where Prager served on the board. In 2020, he said on his radio show that “it’s idiotic you can’t say the N-word.”
PragerU’s most controversial videos include Christopher Columbus saying, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem,” and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, saying, “I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”
That version of history likely appeals to President Donald Trump, who this week said the Smithsonian Institution was focusing too much on “how bad slavery was.”
PragerU’s latest annual report says the platform had 21 million unique visitors in 2024, with millions of views of its videos daily.
‘We bring doctrines to children’
PragerU launched its children’s educational division, PragerU Kids, in 2021. The content features educational videos on historical figures like Theodore Herzl and Golda Meir, biblical lessons about Gideon, David and Goliath, and Moses, as well as stories about Queen Esther and the Maccabees. It also includes hands-on art projects, such as creating a “12 Tribes of Israel Tree,” building a model of the Western Wall using sugar cubes, and crafting a “God Bless America” Christmas ornament.
Some of the content integrates commentary about Israel. An animated video for middle and high schoolers, “Shira Prays for Peace,” features an Israeli girl who will soon serve in the Israel Defense Forces and plays soccer with her best friend, a Muslim girl named Yasmin. The narrator says “Israel is the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations.”
In 2021, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even tweeted a PragerU video, “Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army.” The video claims the Israel Defense Forces “does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”
In 2023, Florida became the first state to approve use of PragerU in its schools. The approval meant teachers wouldn’t have to seek permission to use PragerU’s content in the classroom, but it is unclear how many teachers integrated it into their curriculums. Last year, a local Florida news station could not find a single school district that said they were using the content.
A PragerU spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Forward that “since our resources are not required and educators and parents can use them at their own discretion, there is no way for us to measure how many teachers and schools are using them.”
Still, PragerU Kids has continued to gain traction as a supplemental option. Idaho, South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas soon followed Florida, making PragerU content available to teach civics, history and more. Both Alaska and New Hampshire approved the use of PragerU’s content to teach financial literacy. Montana went a step further, signing a textbook licensing agreement with PragerU. And Oklahoma will now give incoming teachers from some blue states a 50-question multiple-choice assessment developed by PragerU.
That test includes questions about “which chromosome pairs determine biological sex” and “why freedom of religion is important to America’s identity.” (The correct answer to the latter appears to be “It protects religious choice from government control,” which a test taker must choose over “It limits religious teaching in public life.”)
“There is no better example of a curriculum that rips the soul out of the liberal takeover of our schools than providing PragerU to every Oklahoma student,” Oklahoma superintendent Ryan Walters said in PragerU’s 2024 annual report.
PragerU content approved for Louisiana and South Carolina also includes Holocaust education. Some of that content is straightforward, for example the 5-minute video, “What was the Holocaust?” But other content applies the Holocaust to today’s politics.
In Louisiana and South Carolina, one of the approved videos to “contextualize World War II and the Holocaust” includes “Is Facism Right or Left?” featuring Dinesh D’Souza — an incendiary critic of President Barack Obama who was pardoned by Trump in 2018 for making illegal campaign contributions. D’Souza concludes the video by saying, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.”
Among PragerU’s advertised Holocaust education resources is a video for eighth graders and high schoolers titled “Israel at War.” The video features Prager himself in a fireside chat, with a section of the video titled “Israel ‘occupation’ is a lie.” The video also includes a message from Prager to liberals.
“You are voting the opposite of what you believe,” Prager says. “You are damaging our country and the West by doing that.”
The video description also includes a link to sign a petition “to condemn Hamas and stand with Israel.”
Prager has not denied the political nature of PragerU. At a Moms for Liberty Convention in 2023, he said, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement. I said, ‘But what is the bad of our indoctrination?’”
Critics argue lessons like those from PragerU erase Palestinian perspectives while injecting ideology into public schools.
“PragerU’s materials are hyperpartisan to the point of propaganda, inaccurate and incredibly substandard,” Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, told The Washington Post.
“It’s not just an alternate reality to what the existing curriculum is saying, but an alternative to almost any mainstream source of information,” John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, told NBC News.
