ETHNIC CARD

Would somebody please explain to me why, in David Gritten’s otherwise straightforward article about a fascinating young writer, Patrick Marber (“He’s in the Chips,” April 12), it was necessary to refer to the fact that he grew up “in an affluent Jewish family in Wimbledon”? Would the sentence have lost its meaning if he had merely grown up in “an affluent family in Wimbledon”?

I, like many other thinking people, am fed up with The Times’ constant references to people’s ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds, particularly when that has nothing to do with the story. If “Dealer’s Choice” were about five Jewish gamblers, I would concede that letting readers know that the author was himself Jewish (and perhaps, therefore, more credible than say, an Irish Catholic writing on the same subject) might be pertinent. The play, however, has absolutely no ethnic or religious overtones (I attended a preview), unless one wishes to think of being British as being “ethnic.” And the article itself had no such overtones, either. Why, then, were we told what Marber’s possible religious affiliation was?

Who cares if Marber’s family is Jewish? He is a brilliant writer (the play, by the way, is marvelous), and it makes absolutely no difference if he is Jewish, Protestant, agnostic, green, blue or purple.

KRISTENE BURR

Valley Village