Creative Community for Peace called Mark Ruffalo’s attack on Larry and David Ellison antisemitic on Saturday and urged Hollywood not to platform the actor until he retracts his remarks and apologizes.
“Hollywood should not accept this kind of rhetoric from anyone,” CCFP Executive Director Ari Ingel said in a statement provided to the Jewish Journal. “Mark Ruffalo should retract these remarks and apologize, and nobody in Hollywood should platform him until he does.”
The dispute began after Ruffalo attacked the Ellison family and Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The actor shared a video of Israeli-American Oracle Executive Vice Chair Safra Catz discussing assistance Oracle provided to Israel after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Catz said Oracle possessed “really profoundly scary technology” that the company wanted to make available to the Israeli military.
Ruffalo seized on that phrase, warning that the technology could eventually become part of one of the world’s largest media companies and “one day” be “used on you.” He accused Catz of reveling in what he described as a genocide “built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
Ruffalo also called Oracle founder Larry Ellison a “classic oligarch” and accused powerful people of “consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.”
Paramount condemned the remarks, saying the use of antisemitic tropes in a business dispute was “a bridge too far.” A company spokesperson said Paramount does not tolerate prejudice “against anyone.”
Ingel argued that Ruffalo’s message crossed the boundary separating legitimate criticism of a corporate transaction from rhetoric historically used to portray Jews as dangerous and secretly powerful.
“Taken together, his statements echo some of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories in history,” Ingel said, “depicting Jews as a wealthy and sinister elite who accumulate control over media, money and power, then use that control against society.”
CCFP, an entertainment-industry organization whose open letters and campaigns have attracted thousands of signatures from artists, agents and studio executives, said the latest controversy was part of a longer pattern.
Ingel pointed to Ruffalo’s 2021 accusation that Israel was committing genocide. Ruffalo subsequently apologized for that language, calling it inaccurate, inflammatory and “being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad.”
“For nearly a decade, Ruffalo has supported BDS and campaigns to isolate and demonize Israel,” Ingel said. “Instead of becoming more careful with his words, he has repeatedly doubled down on his extremism.”
In 2025, Ruffalo joined thousands of entertainment figures who signed a Film Workers for Palestine pledge promising not to work with Israeli film institutions the organizers considered complicit in “genocide and apartheid.” The campaign said it targeted institutions rather than individual Israelis. Paramount opposed the pledge, arguing that boycotting Israeli filmmakers would impede dialogue rather than promote peace.
CCFP also accused Ruffalo of amplifying sensational or unsupported casualty claims to his millions of social-media followers.
One claim warned that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours. That figure was initially stated by United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher. The underlying food-security assessment, however, projected more than 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among children ages six months to five years over approximately a year—not 14,000 deaths within two days.
CCFP further alleged that Ruffalo circulated a claim that the Gaza death toll had reached 680,000, including 380,000 children under five. The figure was raised by U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who described it as an estimate advanced by unnamed scholars and acknowledged that it had not been confirmed.
Ruffalo has rejected the accusation that his comments were antisemitic.
“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” he wrote Saturday. Ruffalo said criticism of Israel’s prime minister, military-technology contracts and the executives involved should not be equated with hostility toward Jewish people, for whom he said he has “deep love and respect.”
He defended scrutiny of Oracle’s surveillance technology and government contracts, while arguing that the Paramount-Warner merger could threaten editorial independence and eliminate thousands of entertainment-industry jobs.
Ingel responded in the CCFP statement that 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,” he said.
