@Joshua, yeah, I could ignore it—but now it’s become fun. I can imagine my father’s reaction to the baptism if some Mormon spirit came up to him, offering to make him a Christian. I think he’d say: “Fuck you, you anti-Semitt” (that was the way he pronounced anti-Semite).

He worked with people who didn’t like Jews very much. So when there was downtime at the loading docks at Pabst, he drew a swastika on a board and practiced throwing his knife at it. He said it really pissed off the “anti-Semitts.”

Yeah, that’s where I get it from, mostly.

@Jay: See above.

In all my history at Wizbang, the one time I brought up the proxy baptisms generated more passionate arguing and heat than any three other topics. MAN, did that blow up in my face. And I had no idea that it would happen. I had to shut down comments TWICE on it, and the third piece I didn’t even open them.

And here I am again, considering sticking my (ahem) in the blender again and writing about it…

Sigh. Meryl, the things you do to me…

J.

It is official LDS teaching that the spirits of dead people for whom baptisms are performed have the freedom to choose whether to accept the baptism or not. And in Jewish teaching, someone’s performing a baptism for a dead person is just a meaningless act — it has no effect on the dead person’s religion or salvation. So both Mormons and Jews can agree that performing a baptism for a deceased Jew is not going to turn that Jew into a Mormon involuntarily.

Basically, Jews have enough real problems — like the other three items mentioned in your post — that we can do without worrying about the “baptism for the dead” issue.