Comes now a news report that some dead Jews — including the late Lubavitcher rebbe, the grandparents of Steven Spielberg and Carrie Fisher, and hundreds of Holocaust victims — have been given proxy baptisms in Mormon temples. This in apparent violation of a 1995 agreement under which authorities of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said they wouldn’t be doing that anymore.
Because the idea of baptizing Jews without their wanting to be baptized seems like forced conversion, summoning up ugly images from our collective past. At minimum, it suggests that those performing the act consider Judaism to be a defective religion — which of course they do but which we’d like them not to.