`Spectator' defends Cash article repays reading

YOUR front-page article ("British Jews protest to Conrad Black", 4 December) either deliberately or lazily misrepresents William Cash's article, which caused such a fuss. He did not, as Marie Woolf states, write that Hollywood is run by a "Jewish cabal".

The article, having described the extraordinary success of Jews in Hollywood over many years, says "the extent to which this adds up to any sort of Jewish cabal . . . is difficult to assess" and goes on to say that, if it did exist, it was "probably no worse than, say, public schoolboys in the City". As for the Board of Deputies of British Jews - who have not got in touch with me about Mr Cash's article - I commend to them the Jewish Chronicle's leading columnist, Gerald Jacobs, who, while criticising C ash robustly in his account of the piece, wrote "I'm not shrieking and I'm not even shouting `anti-Semitism' ".

It's astonished me how few of the people who attacked William Cash's piece bothered to read the article carefully.

Dominic Lawson The Spectator London WC1