The headline announcing Mark Ruffalo’s latest line of defense was striking. More than 170 Jewish artists had rallied around the actor, denouncing an “outrageous smear campaign” and rejecting accusations that his rhetoric about the Ellison family and the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger trafficked in antisemitic themes.
Read the names and the letter itself, and a different picture emerges.
There are recognizable Hollywood figures among the signatories, including Joel Coen, Tony Kushner, Hannah Einbinder, Ilana Glazer and others. Of the 177 signatories, fewer than half are entertainment figures. The list also contains a significant collection of anti-Israel academics, political organizers, antizionist activists and rabbis whose anti-Israel activism long predates this controversy.
Many have deep connections to the extremist antizionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace.
Rebecca Vilkomerson spent a decade as JVP’s executive director. Phyllis Bennis has served on its board. Rabbi Alissa Wise held senior leadership roles there. Rabbis David Mivasair and Linda Holtzman have served on its Rabbinical Council. Other signatories include longtime BDS advocates and antizionist activists such as Sarah Schulman, Udi Aloni and Naomi Klein.
This context changes how the letter should be understood.
It reads less like an organic uprising of Hollywood’s Jewish community and more like the mobilization of an established antizionist activist network around a celebrity whose rhetoric has increasingly converged with its own.
JVP describes itself as the world’s largest progressive anti-Zionist Jewish organization. Its record tells us what that politics has meant in practice.
On October 7, 2023, while Israelis were still being massacred, raped, and kidnapped and the scale of the Hamas massacre was still coming into view, JVP blamed “Israeli apartheid and occupation” and U.S. complicity as “the source of all this violence.”
Four days later, it accused Israel of launching a “genocidal war” and called on Americans to stop the “imminent genocide” of Palestinians.
The mobilization followed immediately.
JVP organized protests at Senator Chuck Schumer’s home, and with IfNotNow they organized the Capitol demonstration that JVP itself celebrated as a “Jews against Genocide” rally and “the largest Jewish protest in solidarity with Palestinians ever.” Hundreds were arrested. All of this before Israel’s major ground offensive began.
Then came the campuses.
During the 2024 encampment movement, JVP said its student chapters helped organize at least 47 encampments around the country. It celebrated encampments at more than 100 campuses as “liberated zones” and “popular universities for Gaza.”
Columbia suspended its JVP and Students for Justice in Palestine chapters in November 2023 for repeated violations of university event policies.
This is the radical political ecosystem heavily represented among Ruffalo’s defenders in this letter.
It also represents a very small ideological current within American Jewry.
A 2025 national survey commissioned by Jewish Federations of North America found that only 7 percent of American Jews identified as antizionist, while 88 percent said Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
The overwhelming majority of American Jews support the continued existence of a Jewish state. Yet the Ruffalo letter uses Jewish identity to make a small ideological minority appear more representative than it is.
The letter barely engages with the substance of the accusations against Ruffalo. Instead, in a sleight of hand, it replaces scrutiny of his words with a debate about Israel and Gaza.
But the issue was always Ruffalo’s rhetoric.
He fused the Jewish State, Jewish executives, immense wealth, media ownership, “profoundly scary technology” and warnings about concentrated power into a single ominous narrative suggesting that the machinery being assembled by these people could someday be “used on you.”
Antisemitic conspiracy theories have long portrayed Jews as using wealth, hidden influence and control over media or institutions to manipulate society from behind the scenes. Ruffalo’s language is dressed in contemporary political terms, but the structure of the conspiracy is painfully familiar.
The new open letter responds by going further.
“The AI road to WarnerMount runs through Gaza,” it declares. It describes Larry Ellison and his “corrupt cohort” gaining control over what Americans watch while watching us in return. It alleges that the TikTok transaction was motivated in large part by a desire to promote “pro-Israel propaganda.” It connects Gaza, Israel, wealth, media control, surveillance and technological domination into one sweeping theory. The echoes of classic antisemitic conspiracy literature, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are hard to ignore.
The fixation becomes particularly striking when you examine the actual financing of the Warner transaction.
Paramount’s SEC filings identify Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund vehicle and an investment vehicle of the Qatar Investment Authority among the institutional investors participating in the equity syndication.
Yet somehow there is no road to WarnerMount running through Riyadh, Abu Dhabi or Doha. Their geopolitical theory travels almost exclusively through Israel.
The treatment of Safra Catz is equally revealing. Ruffalo circulated an edited video suggesting she was celebrating frightening technology being used against Palestinians. A spokesperson for Catz later clarified the technology she referenced was intended to help rescue hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s October 7 attack. The signatories ignore her explanation and preserve the most inflammatory interpretation possible.
The open letter also leans heavily on another device, the “as a Jew” defense.
Its signatories invoke their Jewish identities, cite polling of American Jews and effectively ask how their argument could possibly enable antisemitism when Jews themselves are making it.
A Jewish signature does not make an extreme claim more factual. It does not make a conspiracy theory less conspiratorial. Jews, like members of every community, can excuse prejudice or provide cover for it. The substance of the rhetoric determines whether it is antisemitic, not the identity of the person delivering it.
Nor are intent and impact the same thing.
Ruffalo may sincerely believe that he is standing up for Palestinians. So may many of the people defending him. Sincerity does not render false claims true or inflammatory rhetoric harmless.
A person can believe he is advocating for Palestinians while spreading falsehoods, embracing extreme claims and contributing to a climate in which hatred toward Jews becomes increasingly normalized. Both can be true.
That responsibility is magnified when the speaker commands an audience of more than 20 million people.
Public figures do not get to judge the consequences of their speech solely by declaring what was in their hearts. Words travel. Narratives spread. And when those narratives tell millions of people that wealthy Jewish and pro-Israel executives are assembling control of media, technology and information as part of a frightening project that will eventually be turned against them, the impact cannot be waved away with assurances of good intentions.
Perhaps the most remarkable line in the open letter is its declaration that the “tired playbook” of raising antisemitism has “run its course.”
Antisemitism does not cease to exist when acknowledging it interferes with a preferred political narrative. And it does not receive a moral exemption because a group of Jewish artists and activists is willing to defend it.
Calling every criticism of Israel antisemitic would be wrong. Calling every accusation of antisemitism a “smear” is just as intellectually dishonest.
The letter does more than defend Ruffalo. It tries to legitimize the very rhetoric it was written to excuse.
The headlines say Jewish Hollywood rallied to Mark Ruffalo. The names, the history and the politics tell a far more revealing story.
