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The Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Creative Community for Peace, three leading pro-Israel advocacy groups in the United States, have condemned Mark Ruffalo for his recent statement against the Ellison family and their pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, arguing the actor’s comments are “antisemitic.”
On Saturday evening, Simon Wiesenthal Center shared a statement from organization CEO Jim Berk saying that, “Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes.”
“We commend (Paramount) for speaking clearly and refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism. At a time when antisemitism is too often minimized, rationalized or repackaged in more socially acceptable language, this kind of moral clarity matters,” the statement continued. “Invoking Israel in an issue where it is completely irrelevant is a textbook case of obsession and demonization. Paramount was right to call it out. More leaders and institutions should have the courage to call antisemitism what it is, regardless of who is spreading it.”
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote that, “The posts by Mark Ruffalo over the past 48 hours are cynical and sickening. Oppose the Paramount merger on the merits, find arguments grounded in facts and draw on what you know about the industry without engaging in antisemitic rhetoric. Introducing the Jewish state out of the blue when it’s entirely unrelated, making baseless claims about Israel, and then trying to avoid accountability by essentially claiming that ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ is gaslighting 101.”
“Mark Ruffalo, your acting might be convincing on screen, but careless and hateful words like yours continue to put Jewish communities around the world at risk while antisemitic incidents are far too common,” he continued.
Earlier on Saturday, Creative Community for Peace called for an industry boycott against Ruffalo until he apologizes and retracts his statements, in which the actor connected David and Larry Ellison’s tech giant Oracle’s business operations to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which Ruffalo described as a genocide. Ruffalo had shared a 2024 clip of former Oracle chief Safra Catz speaking about the company’s tech and its relation to Israel’s military at the Israeli-American Council National Summit.
“Mark Ruffalo’s rhetoric has increasingly crossed the line from criticism of Israel into extremist and antisemitic messaging,” CCFP executive director Ari Ingel said in a statement Saturday.
Ingel added that Ruffalo’s argument against Paramount’s merger “increasingly fuses hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power and ominous warnings about concentrated control into a single narrative.”
“Those echoes are impossible to ignore. Hollywood should not accept this kind of rhetoric from anyone. Mark Ruffalo should retract these remarks and apologize, and nobody in Hollywood should platform him until he does.”
The organization drew its hard line against Ruffalo after the actor issued a statement of his own on Saturday defending his stance against the merger, maintaining that Paramount categorizing his remarks as “antisemitic” was “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”
“Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people,” Ruffalo wrote in a lengthy statement on X. “This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel.”
That statement came in response to TheWrap’s exclusive reporting that Paramount deemed the remarks as “antisemitic” and “a bridge too far” in a statement of its own on Friday.
This isn’t Ruffalo’s first time going to bat for a cause he believes in. Creative Community for Peace reflected on Ruffalo’s years in the spotlight as a vocal critic of Israel and its military actions in Gaza.
“For nearly a decade, Ruffalo has supported BDS and campaigns to isolate and demonize Israel. In 2021, he accused Israel of committing ‘genocide,’ then apologized and admitted that the claim was ‘not accurate,’ ‘inflammatory,’ and was ‘being used to justify antisemitism,’” Ingel said. “Instead of becoming more careful with his words, he has repeatedly doubled down on his extremism, leading to his latest antisemitic attack on Larry and David Ellison.”
Ingel pointed to specific phrases Ruffalo used in Friday’s Instagram post in which he described Larry Ellison as a “classic oligarch” and warned of people “consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.”
As for the Ellisons’ continued ties to tech giant Oracle, which earlier this year touted how its “profoundly scary technologies” aided Israel’s war effort, Ingel said Ruffalo was “recklessly insinuating that the Ellisons have designs to brutalize people worldwide.”
“Taken together, his statements echo some of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories in history, depicting Jews as a wealthy and sinister elite who accumulate control over media, money and power, then use that control against society,” he said. “This is also part of a broader pattern of extremism.”
In regards to Ruffalo maintaining that he is not antisemitic for being critical of the Ellisons, Ingel said, “Intent does not erase impact. Repeatedly amplifying inflammatory falsehoods and rhetoric that mirrors historic antisemitic tropes helps normalize the violent anti-Jewish hatred we are seeing take hold once again around the world, regardless of how he chooses to describe his own motives.”
“Point blank, he has been warned before about the consequences of this rhetoric, yet continues contributing to the toxic antisemitic atmosphere we are witnessing today. That makes him culpable.”
Representatives for Ruffalo did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Editor’s Note: This story, originally published Aug. 22, has been updated to include statements from the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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