180 Jewish Figures Back Ruffalo Amid Paramount Clash — SkimNews
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- Mark Ruffalo drew anti-Semitism accusations from Paramount, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL after an August 21 Instagram post featured Oracle EVP Chair Safra Catz celebrating technology supplied to the Israeli military, which he tied to the Ellison family's Paramount ownership and the Gaza war.
- Paramount rejected Ruffalo's remarks as invoking "anti-Semitic tropes"; Ruffalo called the allegation "appalling and fundamentally dishonest" and said his criticism targets Israeli government policy and executives, not Jewish people.
- More than 180 prominent Jewish figures released a statement Wednesday backing Ruffalo, joining Jane Fonda, John Cusack and Hannah Einbinder, and adding to the 1,400-plus film industry signatories who in April opposed the Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery merger.
- Historians and civil-rights lawyers including Zachary Foster and ADC legal director Jenin Younes described the episode as part of a long-running strategy in which anti-Semitism allegations are deployed to suppress Israel criticism, citing academics Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita being denied tenure and actors Susan Sarandon and Melissa Barrera being dropped by their agencies.
- Larry Ellison contributed $16.6 million in 2017 alone to the Friends of the Israeli Army, and his family's Paramount-Skydance acquired The Free Press in October, installing its pro-Israel founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
- ADC's Younes said the pattern has had a "deleterious" effect on Palestinian activism, citing the ICE detentions of Columbia's Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts' Rumeysa Ozturk as examples that have chilled dissent on US campuses and contributed to the absence of significant student protests against the Iran war.
Why it matters: The episode crystallizes a high-stakes debate over where criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins, with 180 Jewish public figures publicly breaking with the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center—groups that have historically policed that line. Corporate concentration magnifies the stakes: a single family now controls Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, TikTok US and CBS News, and its documented military and ideological ties to Israel sit at the center of a $111 billion merger fight.
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