How Many Jews Does It Take to Settle an Antisemitism Charge?
This article began, somewhat unexpectedly, with my morning reading of the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
A headline caught my attention: “Mark Ruffalo received the support of more than 180 Jewish figures after being accused of antisemitism.”
I read the article, but found myself returning to the headline. Not because there was anything necessarily wrong with it. Quite the opposite: it captured perfectly the paradox at the heart of the story.
Why did it matter that the 180 people defending Ruffalo were Jewish?
The obvious answer is that Ruffalo had been accused of antisemitism. Their Jewish identity therefore seemed to give their defense a particular weight. And that led me to a question that initially sounded almost like the beginning of a bad joke:
How many Jews does it take to clear someone accused of antisemitism?
If more than 180 Jews publicly come to his defense, is he cleared? And what happens when, on the other side, Jewish organizations and a group describing itself as nearly 1,000 members, friends and allies of the Jewish community say that he invoked old antisemitic stereotypes?
Do we count signatures? Does whoever assembles more Jews win?
The question is absurd.
That is precisely why it is worth asking.
The protagonist of this story is Mark Ruffalo. But the real subject is not Ruffalo. Nor, despite appearances, is it Israel. It is something rather more uncomfortable: our growing habit of treating the identity of the person making an argument as a substitute for the argument itself.
It began with Ruffalo’s opposition to Paramount’s massive acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The actor warned about the concentration of power the deal would create and focused attention on Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and father of Paramount CEO David Ellison.
So far, a perfectly recognizable corporate and political argument.
Then Ruffalo went further.
He brought Oracle’s relationship with Israel into the discussion, along with comments by Safra Catz, Oracle’s former CEO, current executive vice chair and a Paramount board member. In a video, Catz spoke about things Oracle had done to help the Israeli military after October 7 and about technology she described as “really profoundly scary” that the company had wanted to make available to that effort.
Ruffalo used those remarks to connect Oracle with what he calls genocide in Gaza and a system of apartheid.
A spokesperson for Catz later said that the specific technology she was referring to was intended to help rescue the hostages kidnapped on October 7.
That does not erase a separate fact: Oracle has had technological relationships with Israeli institutions, including the military, for years.
But it does introduce a distinction worth preserving. What Catz said is one thing. What Ruffalo inferred from it is another.
Paramount responded by accusing him of invoking antisemitic tropes — or, in plainer English, old antisemitic stereotypes.
And that is where the real problem begins.
Where Does Antisemitism Begin?
The accusation against Ruffalo deserves to be taken seriously. But it should not be caricatured.
The more sophisticated argument made by his critics is not simply that criticizing Israel is antisemitic. It is that when Jewish billionaires, enormous fortunes, control of media, political power and Israel are woven into the same narrative, the result risks reproducing one of antisemitism’s oldest stereotypes: the extraordinarily wealthy Jew using money to control institutions and manipulate society.
That stereotype exists. Its history is far too long, and far too bloody, to dismiss.
But here we run into a difficulty.
Larry Ellison really is a billionaire. David Ellison really does run Paramount. Oracle really does have technological ties to Israel. And the Paramount-Warner deal really does represent an enormous concentration of economic and media power.
So the question becomes considerably harder.
How do you criticize a real concentration of power when some of the people concentrating that power happen to be Jewish?
Does the existence of an ancient stereotype about rich and powerful Jews make every criticism of a Jew who actually is rich and powerful suspect?
Obviously not.
But the reverse is not true either. The fact that the corporate relationships are real does not automatically immunize every way of connecting them to Israel, Gaza or Jews.
A statement can contain true facts and still arrange those facts into a prejudiced narrative. And an accusation of prejudice can also be used to discredit a perfectly legitimate criticism.
Which is why we need something that seems increasingly unfashionable: to examine exactly what was said, what was fact, what was inference, and what causal connection was being proposed.
“Some of My Best Friends Are Jewish”
Ruffalo categorically rejected the accusation.
And his central argument is difficult to dispute: criticizing the actions of an Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives supplying that technology is not the same thing as criticizing Jewish people.
Correct.
But then he added something curious. He spoke about how profoundly his Jewish friends, colleagues and loved ones had shaped his acting, activism and humanism.
That may be entirely sincere. It may tell us something meaningful about Mark Ruffalo the person.
As evidence that a particular statement did or did not invoke an antisemitic stereotype, however, it tells us very little.
It is a more elegant version of the familiar: How could I be antisemitic? I have Jewish friends.
Having Jewish friends does not make someone an antisemite.
Nor does it make someone incapable of ever saying something antisemitic.
And then came the 180.
The Identity Certificate
More than 180 Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers signed a public letter defending Ruffalo.
And there is an important detail here: the Jewish identity of the signatories is not incidental to the letter. It is part of how they introduce themselves and part of the moral authority from which they choose to speak.
The signatories describe the allegations against Ruffalo as spurious and denounce what they see as the false and dangerous weaponization of antisemitism to silence legitimate criticism.
They go further, describing the act of pointing to the connections they perceive between Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood as, for them, part of the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.
They may be right.
But they are not right because they are Jewish.
And exactly the same rule has to apply to the other side.
Those who believe Ruffalo invoked old antisemitic stereotypes may also be right.
But they are not right because they are Jewish either.
That is the problem.
We have begun turning identity into something resembling a certificate of moral authenticity. To prove that a statement is antisemitic, we produce Jewish voices condemning it. To prove that it is not, we produce other Jewish voices acquitting it.
And something remarkable happens: we stop debating the statement and start debating the credentials of the people judging it.
Jews Against Jews
Jews are not a collective jury.
There is no single Jewish position on Israel, Gaza, Netanyahu, Zionism, war, America, the left or the right. Nor is there necessarily one Jewish interpretation of every particular allegation of antisemitism.
Pretending otherwise is not merely intellectually absurd. It produces an unpleasant consequence.
Each side begins searching for its own “right Jews.”
For one camp, Jews who identify antisemitism are weaponizing their identity to shield Israel from criticism.
For the other, Jews who defend Israel’s critics are providing cover for people who have crossed the line into antisemitism.
Jewish people themselves then acquire a rather peculiar function: certifying somebody else’s opinions.
We should not need them to do that.
Experience provides perspective.
It does not provide infallibility.
The Ruffalo Test
There is a much less spectacular, but considerably more useful, way of approaching this case.
What exactly did Ruffalo say?
Which parts of what he said are objectively true?
Which parts are inference?
Did he criticize Larry and David Ellison for specific business decisions and relationships, or did their Jewishness somehow become an explanation for those decisions?
Did he attribute to them characteristics historically attributed to “the Jews”?
And perhaps the simplest question of all:
If Larry and David Ellison were Catholic, Protestant or atheist, would Ruffalo’s argument still work?
If the answer is yes, that weighs against the antisemitism charge.
If his argument needs them to be Jewish in order to work, then we have a very different problem.
None of those questions can be answered by counting signatures.
An Intriguing Footnote
There may also be a revealing backstory, although nothing in my argument depends on it.
Page Six, citing unnamed sources, reported that Ruffalo initially worked with lawyer and former Obama administration official Norm Eisen on a way to express contrition for offending Jews without abandoning either his opposition to the merger or his views on Gaza.
According to that account, Eisen approached Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt about becoming involved. Greenblatt reportedly declined, and Eisen later helped organize the letter signed by the Jewish figures defending Ruffalo.
There is good reason for caution here. Ruffalo and Eisen declined to comment on that account, and I have not found independent confirmation of the sequence.
If it is eventually corroborated, however, it raises an interesting question: how did an effort to find an acceptable expression of contrition become a letter describing the antisemitism allegations as spurious?
Interesting, certainly.
Essential to the argument? No.
So, How Many?
Let us return to the absurd question with which we began.
How many Jews does it take to clear someone accused of antisemitism?
None.
And how many does it take to convict him?
None.
Jewish experience matters. Jewish history matters. Jewish voices matter.
But identity is not evidence, and ancestry is not an argument.
More than 180 Jews may be right to defend Mark Ruffalo. They may also be wrong. Exactly the same is true of those who believe his words were antisemitic.
Mark Ruffalo should be judged by what Mark Ruffalo said, by the facts on which he based his claims, and by the associations he chose to make — not by how many Jews can be assembled on either side of his name.
Antisemitism is too serious to be decided by counting Jews.