I found some quotes from Nick Hornby that address some of the specfic concerns mentioned about the film:
Why did David need to be Jewish?
Nick Hornby: First of all, in the memoir, he was. Why I kept him Jewish was that in my childhood, there were memories of discovering that an awful lot of my elders and betters were anti-semitic and racist in various ways. I realized that it had been part of Britiain's cultural history at that point. The other thing that interested me was the mention of the name Peter Rachman, which is touched on very very slightly in the movie but who was a kind of big Jewish landlord gangster of the late 50s and early 60s, and whose treatment of his tenants was so dispicable that it resulted in a change of the law. We still use the word Rachmannism, Rachmannism being a kind of particularly exploitative landlord. There was this sort of Jewish gangster underclass at the end of the 50s beginning of the 60s that I've never seen on film before.
Some of the Forward editors and I were wracking our brains to think of other Jewish characters in your oeuvre — and we couldn’t come up with any. Was this the first expressly Jewish character to appear in your writing?
Nick Hornby: This was my first, and it obviously caused a great deal of anxiety. I developed the script, originally, with a Jewish director. We talked about whether or not to keep him Jewish, and we decided that it would probably be more offensive to excise his Judaism from the piece. Some of the things he does are not good, but it never occurred to me that it was stereotyping. I mean picking up girls at bus stops is not necessarily something that I associate with Judaism.
It wasn’t so much the picking up a girl at a bus stop that some have taken issue with, but rather the portrayal of the Jewish character as greedy and underhanded.
Nick Hornby: Well, I don’t think he’s greedy; I think he’s a petty criminal. This seemed to be an important part of the subculture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. A couple of the people he hangs out with — particularly someone who’s mentioned in the script, called [Peter] Rachman, who was a big Jewish gangster at the time — were part of the British subcultural life, so it felt accurate to me. I hope we’re beyond the point where you can only show ethnic and religious groups in a positive light.
The other issue is that there are a couple of characters that make antisemitic remarks in the film. And I can only think that some people are upset because we didn’t kill the characters that make antisemitic remarks — that they’re not actually punished within the film. … I think that people are not used to the idea that people go unpunished in movies. I think they might be more used to it in books.
You mentioned that you considered writing the Jewish character’s Jewishness out of the script. Why?
Nick Hornby:In a 90-minute movie, when you’re trying to deal with other things as well, you know that you’re going to have to be concise and elliptical about certain issues that are complicated and you just hope that people understand it. I mean clearly I got that wrong to a certain extent in that some people have taken offense.
The Jewish character, David, frequently employs the collective “we” when he speaks: “This is how we are,” and so on. Is he referring to him and his friend, Danny? Or is he referring to the Jews?
Nick Hornby: To the Jews? Oh my God, no. He’s talking about him and Danny. I’m very surprised that some people think that the “we” refers to the Jews, and I can see that that’s offensive. Of course, I regret that.
http://www.forward.com/articles/121166/
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Inter...nby-15167.html
Also, I was thinking about Danny in the film (Danny is David's friend/partner in crime). Is mention ever made of Danny's religious and/or cultural background? Is he Jewish?