The Nexus of the Ruffalo Problem

The Nexus Project has finally answered the question that has trailed it since its founding: What is its definition of antisemitism actually for? Apparently, it is for acquittals.

Let me offer some background for readers who have better things to follow than definitional politics. The Nexus Document is the antisemitism definition preferred by critics of the mainstream IHRA working definition, drafted by scholars who worry that IHRA sweeps too much criticism of Israel into the category of Jew-hatred. Nexus protects “even contentious, strident, or harsh criticism of Israel for its policies and actions.” Its champions present it as the careful alternative, the one that knows where the line really is. Fine. A definition written by the defense bar is still a definition, and this week its authors were handed a test case that any first-year student could grade.

Mark Ruffalo, celebrity opponent of Paramount’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, shared a video of Safra Catz, Oracle’s Israeli-born Jewish executive, and wrote, “Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.” He explained that “this is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition,” called Ellison a “classic Oligarch,” and warned that Oracle’s technologies “will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you.” Paramount called that what it is: antisemitic tropes invoked in service of a business dispute.

Then the Nexus Project weighed in. “Claiming Mark Ruffalo is antisemitic is misguided,” it announced. “He expressed his opinion about a corporation’s actions and investments, not an executive’s religion. Whether you agree with him or not, he did not cross the line into antisemitic speech.” 

To be clear, if Ruffalo had written that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Nexus would shield him, and under its own terms that would be a defensible application. But that is not what he wrote, because Israel is not a party to this merger. The Gaza material was imported into a domestic business dispute for one purpose: to indict the Jews in the deal.

And once the target is Jews rather than Israeli policy, the Nexus Document itself takes over. Read it. Their document says it is antisemitic to hold “individuals or institutions, because they are Jewish, a priori culpable of real or imagined wrongdoing committed by Israel.” Catz sells software. She commands no army. Her “culpability” in Ruffalo’s telling, indeed her alleged delight, flows entirely from her identity and her country of birth. The document further says it is antisemitic to characterize Israel “as being part of a sinister world conspiracy of Jewish control of the media, economy, government.” Ruffalo’s post assembled precisely that machine: Jewish money, Israeli entanglement, a media giant, and technology that will “one day” be “used on you.”  

Running the substitution test is easy here, because Ruffalo even supplied the control group. Jamie Dimon is helping finance the same transaction, and Ruffalo attacked him too, but with ordinary antitrust invective about cozy relationships and oligarchs. No genocide. No “reveling.” The vocabulary changed exactly once, when the target was Jewish. Nexus wrote a double-standards principle into its document for exactly this comparison. At least in theory.

Notice what Nexus did choose to rebut. Nobody said a word about anyone’s religion. No critic of Ruffalo’s post claimed he attacked Catz’s faith. Nexus is arguing with an accusation no one made, because the actual accusation, that the post is antisemitic under Nexus items 3(a) and 3(c) by their plain text and principle 2 (double standards) by application, has no answer. When an organization built by scholars responds to a textual argument by refuting a strawman, it is telling you it read the text and lost.

Nexus did not rule alone. J Street soon offered the same absolution in catechism form. 

Antisemitism, it explained, is “blaming Jewish people for the actions of the Israeli government”; what antisemitism is not is “criticism of a corporation’s monopolistic actions and investments”; and “we cheapen the fight against antisemitism when we blur that distinction.” Blaming a Jewish person for the actions of the Israeli government is J Street’s own opening definition of the offense, and blaming a Jewish person for the actions of the Israeli government is what the Catz post does, by name, on video. We do cheapen the fight against antisemitism when we blur the distinction between Jew-hatred and criticism. We cheapen it to nothing when, having drawn the distinction correctly, we shield the Jew-hatred anyway.

The Nexus Project says it exists to stop accusations of antisemitism from being “used as a shield” against good-faith criticism. On Sunday it used its own letterhead as one, and J Street held its coat. This has stopped being a scholarly disagreement about where the line sits and become credentialed cover for people who cross it, and the Jewish community can see the difference. So the ask is simple, offered in the same good faith both groups demand of everyone else. Apply your own published definitions to the Catz post, clause by clause, in public. Or retire them, and stop presenting yourselves as referees of a foul you will not call. 

Mark Goldfeder is CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School. Follow him on X @markgoldfeder