I greatly appreciated Dave Rich’s critique of The Lehman Trilogy; he did an excellent job of laying out the dangers of the normalisation of antisemitic tropes (“Antisemitic tropes back on stage again”, Focus). His highlighting of specific aspects where unnecessary “Jewishness” was injected divulges his sophisticated understanding of the material and its impact.
I’m left deeply perplexed that in his closing paragraph he does not call for the condemnation of this play. I fail to understand how Mr Rich can claim that those behind the play are not “a bunch of Jew-haters” when the entirety of the article makes it clear that the fundamental antisemitism isn’t accidental.
Aryeh Barson
Santa Cruz, California
Marriage can be selfish too
Martha Gill’s excellent piece on fewer people getting married, and being more independent, will doubtless elicit cries of “selfishness” from some (“Fewer people are marrying. That’s cause for celebration, not state intervention”, Comment). It is relatively rare to read such views in a serious newspaper. It is important to remember that, apart from cases of coercion, there is no unselfish reason for getting married, and no unselfish reason for having children. But are most middle-class journalists perhaps married parents?
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany
Ireland’s sporting pedigree
Michael Aylwin makes some valid observations on why Irish rugby is prospering so well compared with Welsh (“Wales in crisis: regions the bane of a rugby nation facing the abyss”, Sport). However, he makes an error of context when he says rugby here uniquely faces a lack of competition for players and supporters from another sport. True, there is no top-level association football league but there is Gaelic football and hurling, organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association, which dominate as our national sports. Historically, rugby struggled to be more than a minority sport but in recent years there has been a growing cross-fertilisation between the sports such that a number of our leading rugby stars, such as Shane Horgan and Rob Kearney, also have a background in Gaelic football, as does Eoin Morgan in hurling.
The opening up of the GAA’s Croke Park stadium to rugby and soccer while the Aviva Stadium was being built was but another sign of the general acceptance by the Irish sporting public of the pleasure to be derived from success in major international sports such as rugby, cricket and soccer. That pleasure equals bums on seats.
Howard Rose
Dublin
Power politics
Could I please ask Zoe Zero how many general elections were won by Jeremy Corbyn and by Tony Blair when each was Labour party leader (“Why we voted for Jeremy Corbyn – all 12 million of us”, Letters)? I think the answer indicates what sort of politics the electorate are prepared to vote for. Radical change is all very well but in order to achieve that it is necessary, first, to get into power. Without power, you achieve nothing.
Paul Brennock
Roweltown, Carlisle, Cumbria
Democracy rules OK
Simon Tisdall is mistaken in believing that Joe Biden’s “‘us and them rhetoric’ is a geopolitical dead end” (“Outdated and out of time. Why Biden’s global democracy crusade is doomed”, World Affairs Commentary). There are countries that elect their leaders in open and fair elections and there are others that do not. The democratic countries have been gaining ground and will continue to do so because people around the world are sharing information and getting smarter. Tisdall’s emphasis on Biden’s age is parroting the American right’s smears. Biden has lived long enough to realise that democracy is a fundamental principle on which civilised society depends.
Matthew Bowles
Norwich
Digging up the past
Bettany Hughes was quoted as having been told that in 2000 she became the first female historian to present a TV history series in the UK (“This much I know”, Magazine). However, that depends on how narrowly you interpret the word “historian”. While I don’t know if she was the first, I can remember the academic archaeologist Catherine Hills presenting the eight-part Channel 4 series Blood of the British in 1984, some 16 years earlier.
Tony Bradstreet
Attleborough, Norfolk
Call the DUP’s bluff
Andrew Rawnsley is right about the negotiations on the Northern Ireland protocol (“Rishi Sunak must not flinch from a vital fight with the Tory Brextremists”, Comment). But he doesn’t come down anywhere near hard enough on the DUP, who have been allowed to blackmail the government over the protocol. It is time to call their bluff and put right what is probably the biggest error made by any UK government of the last century, which was to divide Ireland.
If the government asked the UK as a whole whether it wanted to keep Northern Ireland as part of the UK, I doubt whether the answer would be yes. And we are reaching the point at which the people of Northern Ireland may well vote to reunify the island of Ireland anyway. A simple majority sufficed to bring about Brexit and in a referendum the same should apply here.
Dave Pollard
Leicester
Who’d be a referee?
What an appalling message conveyed by Kieran Trippier (“If you want to be successful you have to be cute. We’ll do everything we can to win”, Sport). We used to call it cheating. Then Ferguson’s Manchester United initiated the orchestrated harassing of referees; thereafter Wenger’s Arsenal made it into an art; finally Mourinho’s Chelsea made it a science. My very best wishes – and sympathies – to any match officials.
Andrew Cobb
Newbridge, Bath
Going postal
Nobody needs to be denied a vote because they don’t have the right ID (“Voter ID plan risks hindering our democracy”, Editorial). All people have to do is apply for a postal vote. No ID required either to apply or to vote, it’s easy to apply from your local council, and one application covers all subsequent elections, local and general, thereafter. Job done. One can only speculate as to why the government does not widely publicise this.
Anne Johns
Littleover, Derby
