Unfair Picture of Britain

To describe Britain of the ‘30s, sweepingly, as “anti-Semitic,” as if this bigotry was as institutionalized as apartheid in South Africa, or lunch counter and back-of-the-bus discrimination here in the South--whoa! F. Kathleen Foley is just a bit too unequivocal (“Menace and Melancholy,” July 10).

And if Harold Pinter, master of the enigma and the pause, has given her this all-embracing impression, then he, with due respect, needs correcting, too.

Such an attitude takes no account of traditional British tolerance and absorption of minorities--or the specific generosity with which refugees from Nazism were admitted onto the crowded island with, then, 2 million unemployed. Certainly there was, has been and will continue to be anti-Semitism, exploited (in those days) by minority parties such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. But to lump the whole nation and its society as anti-Semitic, then or now, is not justified.

NORMAN HUDIS

Woodland Hills