Many a manual man among Jews

David Byers (JC April 14), from his inability to change a light bulb, generalises that Jewish men are incapable of manual work.

I’m too old now but I can recall spending a week repainting the whole of my three-bedroom house as well as growing vegetables. In an earlier house I did the wallpapering. And what about all those immigrants of 100 years ago who were tailors, cap-makers, shoemakers or, like my grandfather and father, were cabinet-makers?

Harold Pollins, it is simply that, of the many tribes around, the wandering Israelites were “chosen” to receive God’s word. There is a prevailing view that some of us wish God has chosen someone else for all the tsores that went with the job. down a Syrian trying to speak on Syria at a demonstration about Syria was “insane”.

He’s right, and such insanity explains why the left so loathe Israel: it’s too democratic for their instinctively authoritarian tastes.