{"id":64,"date":"2010-09-03T09:17:19","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T09:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/mormons-jews-holocaust-victims.html"},"modified":"2010-09-03T09:17:19","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T09:17:19","slug":"mormons-jews-holocaust-victims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/mormons-jews-holocaust-victims.html","title":{"rendered":"Mormons, Jews, Holocaust victims"},"content":{"rendered":"

I confess that I’m always a little bit embarrassed by the propensity of
\nthe American leadership of my people (the Jews) to try to get Christians
\nto grant us admission in the, ah, club. The president of the Southern
\nBaptist Convention opines that God doesn’t hear our prayers…well, why
\nshould we give a shit? Sorry.<\/p>\n

So my feelings are mixed about the agreement announced this week<\/a>
\nbetween the LDS Church and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
\nSurvivors and Their Descendants, making Jewish victims of the Holocaust
\nthe only group exempt from the Mormon doctrine permitting the baptism of
\nthe dead, thereby enabling them to win a place in heaven. Unless, I
\nguess, you’re a Mormon with a forebear who was a Jewish victim of the
\nHolocaust, in which case you’re entitled to request the baptism. In
\nMormonism, Family trumps just about everything.<\/p>\n

Over at Religion Dispatches, the estimable Joanna Brooks thinks<\/a>
\nthis is a good thing. She’s a Mormon woman married to a Jewish man, and
\nshe takes the occasion to wish us all a happy new year. L’shana tova to
\nyou too, Joanna. The hard question has to do with how far and under
\nwhat circumstances one religious group should alter or suppress a
\nteaching or practice or right in deference to the feelings or doctrines
\nof another group–or to the norms or greater good of society at
\nlarge–be it in Salt Lake or in lower Manhattan. And let’s not pretend this is not a hard question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I confess that I’m always a little bit embarrassed by the propensity of the American leadership of my people (the Jews) to try to get Christians to grant us admission in the, ah, club. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention opines that God doesn’t hear our prayers…well, why should we give a shit? Sorry.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nMormons, Jews, Holocaust victims - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/mormons-jews-holocaust-victims.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mormons, Jews, Holocaust victims - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I confess that I’m always a little bit embarrassed by the propensity of the American leadership of my people (the Jews) to try to get Christians to grant us admission in the, ah, club. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention opines that God doesn’t hear our prayers…well, why should we give a shit? 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}