"Kaddish" is the fifteenth episode of the fourth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files.

The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

In the episode, Isaac Luria (Harrison Coe), a Jewish man, is killed by a group of teenagers working for a racist shop owner.

Originally, the script called for the antagonist to be an African American "Louis Farrakhan-like" character, but Fox was concerned that the show's increasing popularity with black viewers would be damaged by this, and Gordon agreed to make the villains into, in his words, "cartoonish neo-Nazis".

In Brooklyn, New York, a group of Hasidic Jews gather at a cemetery for the funeral of Isaac Luria (Harrison Coe), who had been beaten and shot to death by a gang of three young neo-Nazis.

When one of Isaac's assailants is found strangled with the dead man's fingerprints on his body, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are called in to investigate.

Mulder and Scully then interview Curt Brunjes (Jonathan Whittaker), the racist owner of a copy shop across the street from the market where Isaac worked.

The next morning, Mulder and Scully find a Sefer Yetzirah, a book on Jewish mysticism buried with Isaac's body; it mysteriously bursts into flames.

After an intense fight, in which Jacob and Mulder are both wounded, Ariel declares her love for Isaac and returns the creature to dust.

During the ceremony, the officiating rabbi, who was a survivor of the Holocaust, used a real Jewish relic: the communal ring that was eventually featured in the episode.

Gordon later rewrote the script because he realized "black anti-Semitism is a very subtle and difficult subject and not what I needed in my dramatic structure.

[6] Justine Miceli, the actress who played Ariel, based her character's sorrowful demeanor on the memory of her own father's death due to cancer.

Initially, he was disappointed when actor David Groh affected a Yiddish accent, for fear that Weiss' scenes could "lapse into parody rather easily".

[2] In the episode, however, Mulder is unable to identify a Jewish book, states that he does not know Hebrew, and quips that Jesus returned from the dead.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson ended up spending far more production time than originally allotted to shoot the scene.

Originally, the production team was going to remove the hotel's neon sign, but director Manners, instead, decided to "move the camera another five feet", thereby avoiding "prohibitive" expenses.

"[7] Series composer Mark Snow heavily featured "clarinet, violin, and cello solos" in the episode's score and readily admits to "borrow[ing]" J.S.

[2] Robert Shearman, in his book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, analyzed Gordon's portrayal of racism and anti-Semitism.

"[5] Juliette Harrisson of Den of Geek named "Kaddish" the best stand-alone episode of season four and called its conceit "absolutely real and utterly tragic" despite being "highly fantastical".

[14] Vitaris cited the Golem's disintegration as "a leitmotif, a reminder of death, a beautiful way to translate into visual terms the depth of Ariel's grief.