The Ruffalo Affair: 170 Hollywood Jews Sign On to Defend an Antisemitic Trope

In late August, actor Mark Ruffalo posted a message on social media linking David Ellison — head of Paramount Skydance and architect of the $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery — to Oracle, the company of his father Larry Ellison, which he accused of sustaining "a system of apartheid and oppression" in Gaza. He described Larry Ellison as a "classic oligarch" who "crushes workers and hoards the world's wealth for his own power." Both Ellisons are Jewish, and outspoken supporters of Israel.

The reaction was swift. Paramount denounced "antisemitic tropes." The president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles called out rhetoric that "combines Jewish wealth, media control, secret technology and sinister global power" — which is, word for word, the grammar of antisemitic conspiracy theory for over a century. The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Creative Community For Peace followed suit. "Fauda" co-creator Avi Isaacharoff summed the man up in one phrase: "a rare combination" of "ignorant" and "stupid."

Then came the counterattack: an open letter signed by some 170 Jewish figures — Joel Coen, Jonathan Glazer, Tony Kushner and Joaquin Phoenix among them — denouncing a "false and dangerous weaponization of accusations of antisemitism." Better still: the letter asserts that pointing to "the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood" is "the very essence of Jewish ethical duty." George Clooney added his voice on Thursday.

Let's be clear: portraying a Jewish billionaire as the hidden master of a media empire in the service of "apartheid" is not criticizing a merger. It is recycling the oldest template of Jew-hatred — money, media, hidden power — with a progressive veneer. Whether Ruffalo is aware of it or not hardly matters: the trope works independently of intentions. The Los Angeles Federation was not fooled.

But the real stakes go beyond Ruffalo. What this affair establishes is a formidable precedent: from now on, any accusation of antisemitism aimed at the cultural left can be neutralized by a letter from "ethical" Jews certifying otherwise. The 170 signatories are not defending a friend; they are offering an infinitely reusable absolution mechanism, in which the Jewish identity of the signers serves as a shield for the very rhetoric it should be fighting.

And here is the angle no one is highlighting: the Hollywood battle is not a celebrity feud — it is a battle for the monopoly on definition. Who decides what is antisemitic: the communal institutions that document the tropes, or a progressive vanguard claiming moral ownership of the term? Even Kenneth Lonergan, Ruffalo's friend of thirty years, who calls the accusation "preposterous," is careful to state his "profound" disagreement with Ruffalo's positions on Israel and "Iran's constellation of fanatical Islamist proxies." That nuance is one the letter of the 170 never makes. And that is precisely its most eloquent silence.