Todd Haynes and Wallace Shawn among signatories of letter backing Mark Ruffalo amid antisemitism charge

A collective of more than 170 prominent Jewish artists – including Todd Haynes, Joel Coen, Miranda July, Hannah Einbinder, Wallace Shawn and Naomi Klein – have signed an open letter supporting Mark Ruffalo.The actor had been accused of invoking antisemitic tropes after he criticized Paramount Skydance, the media company owned by David Ellison, a Donald Trump ally. Ruffalo had spoken out about the $111bn merger with Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).In a statement posted to social media last week, the actor had highlighted the links between Paramount Skydance, poised to become one of the biggest media conglomerates in the US pending a court decision, and Oracle, the technology company owned by Ellison’s father, Larry, that has long supplied software to the Israel Defense Forces and government. Paramount responded to Ruffalo, saying it was “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute”.The letter, titled “Enough!”, dismisses the accusation against Ruffalo as part of an “outrageous smear campaign” and calls for the end to “the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact”.“Calling Mark Ruffalo antisemitic because he is questioning a massive corporate merger is not only absurd – it’s a dangerous way to shut down legitimate criticism,” Ilana Glazer, the former Broad City star, said in an additional statement.In his original post, Ruffalo shared a video of Safra Catz, former Oracle CEO and the current executive vice-chair, describing the “really profoundly scary technology” the company provided to Israel after the 7 October attack by Hamas in 2023. The actor accused Larry Ellison – who is worth an estimated $189bn and agreed to personally backstop $40.4bn in equity financing to help Paramount Skydance acquire WBD – of “using [Oracle] to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition” and linked the software deals with the IDF to the merger that would unite two of the remaining five legacy studios in Hollywood, as well as a host of networks and news operations.“These ‘really profoundly scary technologies’ will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you,” Ruffalo wrote.Ruffalo urged his followers to oppose the merger, which he claimed would be “catastrophic” for the entertainment industry. In a separate statement after Paramount’s response, Ruffalo said: “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. “This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel.”The letter, whose signatories include Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers, affirmed Ruffalo’s argument against the $111bn merger that already secured approval from the Trump administration in June: “The proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery is no mere combination of two huge multinational companies. Yes, it will destroy thousands upon thousands of livelihoods. Yes, it will further consolidate the oligarchic control of our media (witness the gutting of CBS News). Yes, it will strangle competition and creativity in film and television production and distribution.“But it will do all this and more as part of a larger project of tech-driven domination,” the letter continues, “a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting – and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors.”The letter cited the Trump-brokered sale of TikTok by the Chinese company ByteDance to US investors including Oracle; Larry Ellison’s reported $350m in personal funding of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change amid the former prime minister’s ultimately unsuccessful bid, backed by Jared Kushner, to occupy a key position on Trump’s transitional board of peace for Gaza; and Oracle executives’ public backing of Israel’s military strikes in Gaza, “which has become an open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies” celebrated by Catz and other Oracle officials.“Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism,” the letter said. “It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.”