Ysoscher Katz
By Ysoscher Katz
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Community Yisroel Horowitz, 72, Talmud scholar with a mischevous smile
Covid 19 has been brutal to my birth community, the Ultra-Orthodox communities from Brooklyn and Upstate New York. The virus has been relentless. Every day brings a list of new chareidi victims. I know almost all of them, to one degree or another. They are former friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or people who are otherwise well-known…
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Life The Talmud Calls For Fasts To Repent For Sexual Impropriety. It’s Time To Bring Them Back.
The Jewish holidays can put our ethical fiber at risk, the preeminent Talmudic commentator Rashi writes. His comment appears in tractate Kiddushin (81a), where the rabbis of the Talmud quote a somewhat enigmatic Aramaic idiom: sakba de’sha’ata rigla. Rashi interprets it to mean that, ethically, holidays are particularly precarious periods of the year, since men…
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Opinion Why The Orthodox Hate ‘Tikkun Olam’
Jonathan Neumann is furious at Liberal Judaism and I understand why. It was not so long ago that I was angry at them as well. Sadly, though, his anger makes him commit an infraction that is not so different from the transgression that incites his own righteous indignation. He lacerates his political adversaries for misusing…
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Life Can We Turn Rubashkin’s Release Into a Greater Good?
I personally was not that thrilled about Sholom Rubashkin’s premature release from prison last Wednesday, after serving only eight years of a 27-year sentence. The horrific crimes he committed were still fresh in my memory, my repulsion not dimmed by time. But the cacophonous celebration I witnessed on social-media was too overwhelming: Many of my…
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Opinion I Vowed Never To Talk Politics From My Pulpit. Then Trump Came Along.
Every era has its pivotal where-were-you-when-you-heard-that-x-happened moment. Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy was assassinated? That the Reverend Martin Luther King was murdered? That astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? These events are watershed moments that shatter our routine and make us challenge fundamental assumptions about the world around us. They…
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Opinion We Won’t Give Up On Israel, Even If American Jewish Historians Do
Private Hasia Diner, overwhelmed by the pressures of war, abandoned the battlefield this week. Her resignation letter in Haaretz projects the death of her fighting spirit onto the state of Israel. She is wrong about Israel. The young state is doing fine. Her disqualifying critiques are exaggerated. They reflect the natural growing pains of a…
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Opinion What Gay Pride Parade Stabber Has in Common With His Victims
I wish Yishai Schlissel, the perpetrator of the crime at Thursday’s Jerusalem gay pride parade, had paused for a moment to first speak to the marchers. If he did, he would have realized how much he had in common with them. I know Schlissel. Not personally, but I know the personality. I grew up in…
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Opinion The Whole Orthodox World Is Complicit in Faigy Mayer’s Death
Another beautiful soul died this past weekend, prematurely and unnecessarily. Thirty-year-old Faigy Mayer was after having plummeted from a 20-story building in Manhattan. Officials described her death as a possible suicide. While Faigy may have taken her life, the will to live was taken away from her by a community that is sadly complacent and…
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