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Passivity Blaster: Why I signed the Jewish open letter supporting Mark Ruffalo and opposing Paramount/Warner Bros. and Oracle
the second in a series about media advocacy
As an active member of the Block the Merger coalition and Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, I’m proud to be among the more than 180 Jewish writers, artists, activists, and clergy who signed an open letter supporting Mark Ruffalo and opposing the weaponization of antisemitism by media monopolies and surveillance tech profiteers.
It went public Tuesday and was covered widely, including in Variety, Deadline, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Times of Israel, Daily News, and The Wrap, among others. See the full letter and signatories at the end of this essay.
The back story
First up: this isn’t about — and is bigger than — Mark Ruffalo, one of the most public faces of the Block the Merger coalition. For saying some true things about surveillance tech behemoth Oracle, the actor was used as agitprop by two multinational media and tech conglomerates that gamed a clickbait-hungry news ecosystem.
Wait, what? Don’t worry, I’ll back up.
Before we dig into the open letter and what does and doesn’t constitute antisemitism (starting at “Oy vey” below) — and before deconstructing Paramount’s frame through a media literacy lens (“Fire up your bullshit detector”) — let’s unwind two weeks of controversy.
It began when Ruffalo shared this resurfaced video clip of Safra Catz, Oracle vice chair and former CEO, bragging that her company provided proprietary tech “to advance the agenda for the Israeli military” because they “stand with the military establishment of Israel.”
We have some profoundly scary technology at Oracle, and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the effort.
Complete text of Ruffalo’s caption above Catz’s video (emphasis mine):
This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.
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. 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.
There is an old saying. “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”
From one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world. Why has Trump pushed this illegal merger through?
Larry Ellison will own most of “Para Bros”. Larry is a classic Oligarch. They are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.
We have a chance to stop this. There are 12 state Attorneys General suing to block this merger. It will be catastrophic for our film industry.
There will be a loss of 4500 direct film making jobs and the loss of another 10k ancillary jobs. Merger like this are almost always bad for workers, consumers, and the industry they tend to dominate. It’s a classic antitrust case.
It will hike up the cost of cable and flatten out competition. This means less choice for our audiences. It also concentrates an enormous amount of creative control to companies that say and do things like this strange woman from Oracle.
Really profoundly Scary people.
Paramount’s PR fakeout
The bolded sections fueled Oracle and Paramount’s desperation to get us to talk about aaaaaanything other than the existential threats posed by their illegal attempt to acquire Warner Bros, which I wrote about last week.
Media literate readers understand that Ruffalo critiqued corporate entities and war crimes, not Jews.
But as owners of two of the most powerful multinational media corporations (not as Jews), Papa and Babyboy Ellison know how to shift the narrative in a nation largely lacking media literacy. Their PR apparatus seized on Ruffalo’s critique of genocide by the Israeli military — and Paramount and Oracle’s attempt to consolidate wealth and power — to pivot away from how their merger would harm the entertainment industry, press freedom, workers, consumers, and democracy… and toward a frothy round of “Pssst, didja hear, The Hulk hates the Jews!”
At first, it seemed like their public shaming was working as planned.
An immediate barrage of news coverage from The Hollywood Reporter to The Jerusalem Post amplified Paramount’s frame that Ruffalo had hatefully invoked “antisemitic tropes” in a random way “in purported service of a business dispute,” and that he only opposes the merger because the Ellisons are Jewish. Ruffalo “hulks out with hate,” one headline blared.
Most prominent news stories didn’t share Catz’s video. With outlets omitting that crucial context, predictable social media diatribes and bitter arguments followed. The internet had its latest main character.
An ad hoc Hollywood group calling themselves “The Brigade” kept the news cycle churning with an open letter attacking The Avengers star as a bad-faith bigot spreading “centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theories” that “put [the Jewish] community in grave danger.” Pro-Israel advocacy group Creative Community for Peace lobbed slurs and demanded Hollywood boycott Ruffalo, whose “extremism” “helps normalize… violent anti-Jewish hatred.” Most shamefully, the Simon Weisenthal Center said they “commend Paramount” for (gag) “moral clarity” in calling out a “textbook case of obsession and demonization.”
Ruffalo issued a statement denouncing antisemitism and clarifying a concept so simple it should go without saying: “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.”
In a poor substitute for legitimate news, journalists continued to cover “the debate” about whether Ruffalo is or isn’t an antisemite. Influencers and bots weighed in for clicks until it seemed like all anyone was talking about.
They overplayed their hand
It looked like Paramount and Oracle had successfully shut down conversation over the material harms of this supervillain-level merger, which I covered last week when our coalition launched a public #NoConcessions petition to the 12 AGs suing Paramount on antitrust grounds:
…every single person will be negatively affected if Paramount is allowed to control two of the big four movie studios, two of the most influential TV news networks (CBS and CNN), HBO, BET, Comedy Central, Discovery, Cartoon Network, DC Comics, many other entertainment and sports networks and channels, two of four historical news archives, and TikTok.
The impact of a media monopoly this big on journalistic independence, challenging art, viewpoint diversity, labor conditions, job availability, media opportunities for women and people of color, and consumer prices would be astronomical under any conditions.
VIDEO: Illegal ParaBros merger, explained
But they didn’t factor in how deeply unpopular their plans are. Or how little most people buy Paramount’s self-interested spin that theirs will be the first merger that helps more than it hurts (especially while David Ellison blackmails California by threatening to devastate Hollywood by moving Paramount to Tennessee or Texas.) Perhaps their biggest blind spot: underestimating how widely respected Ruffalo is as an artist, an activist who has spent decades speaking truth to power, and a genuinely decent human.
Slowly, celebrities previously reticent to publicly condemn the merger — likely for fear of professional repercussions — began to do so, leading news media to pivot back to the real issues at stake. Ultimately their voices, and the fandoms they can activate, will strengthen the Block the Merger coalition’s efforts.
Emmy-winning Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, who is Jewish, was the first major celeb to set the record straight in a widely-reported Instagram story:
The idea that he only said these things because the Ellisons are Jewish is LUDICROUS,” she continued. “Is it also antisemitic to point out that Safra Catz, the Oracle executive vice chair who boasted about the ‘profoundly scary technology’ provided to the IDF, also sits on Paramount’s board? Or that Larry Ellison has been buying favor with Trump by donating tens of millions to his political effort for years? Or that he once offered Netanyahu a lucrative Oracle post?
…If you want to make it about the Ellisons being Jewish, then you are the one being antisemitic… For those of us who ACTUALLY care about jewish safety, we want that word to actually mean something so that when jews are actually in danger it’s taken seriously.
George Clooney brought his star power to bear in Venice, calling Ruffalo “a good man” and shifting focus back to the actual stakes: “I don’t see how the merger financially ends up making sense… I always worry whenever big companies are consolidating because it means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.”
Also widely reported: Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan’s letter to The Hollywood Reporter calling Paramount’s false accusations “a cynical and disgusting lie,” just “deflections” because “they can’t or won’t defend” the substance of his merger critique.
The Committee for the First Amendment’s excellent statement includes comments (pics 3–5) from founder Jane Fonda and Oscar-winning producer Bruce Cohen. A coveted news source for more than half a century, Jane is the only celebrity as closely associated with our coalition’s work as Mark. Boom: A new wave of coverage highlighted her counter-frame about Paramount’s “smear” campaign
to delegitimize criticism of the merger and to distract from the question Paramount would rather not answer: Should one company be allowed to accumulate this much power over our movies, television and news?
Oy vey with this mishegas
When you’ve dealt with real antisemitism, you know what it actually looks like: discrimination, violent hate crimes, persistent conspiracy theories, slurs, dehumanization.
It’s not always as extreme as the pogroms and Nazi death camps that wiped out the majority of my grandparents’ families on both sides, or the Siberian labor camp where my paternal grandmother was forced to chop down trees for years, or the dangerous anti-Jewish climate in Poland that spurred my father and his parents to immigrate to New York in the late 1960s. Or the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, this year’s manosphere-influenced arson attack at Mississippi’s historic Beth Israel Congregation by a guy who believed it was the “synagogue of Satan,” or the dramatic rise in hate crimes against Jews and their shuls, cemeteries, and businesses since Trump’s first term.
Sometimes it’s “just” a passing intrusion on your humanity, like the children who dared each other to check if I had horns while they thought I was asleep at summer camp. (I was young enough to wonder if they thought I was a unicorn.) Or the fear and outrage when a president pals around with white supremacists. Or the shock and humiliation of swastikas scrawled on my Brooklyn subway station after Trump’s first inauguration.
Or how I saw Twitter’s white nationalist devolution coming in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s deadly “Jews will not replace us!” Charlottesville riot. After nearly a decade of near-constant rape threats and misogynistic harassment, those same trolls started Photoshopping my face onto concentration camp victims; back then I wasn’t writing about Jewish issues and hadn’t yet joined JFREJ, so I recognized the arrival of a new “open season on Jews” era. I stopped using Twitter, leaving 40,000 followers behind despite the cost to my writing and speaking career. That was years before the world’s richest man bought it, dismantled trust and safety teams, renamed it X, and turned it into a playground for Nazis, rape apologists, nonconsensual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material, and conspiracists of many stripes.
And who helped Elon Musk — one of the biggest disinformation superspreaders on the internet — acquire Twitter? No other than Larry Ellison, who gave his “very close friend” $1 billion toward the deal and sits on Tesla’s board.
Really pause to think about that: While Paramount and Oracle conveniently weaponize antisemitism as a bait-and-switch to blunt the Block the Merger movement, neither Larry nor David Ellison has ever uttered a peep about Elon’s massively influential antisemitism (out loud, online, and in action, or how X makes life less safe for Jews.
So while Mark Ruffalo is not antisemitic — as our letter below shows — I doubt Paramount and Oracle would care if he was. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is currently helping a Paramount shareholder sue the Ellisons for corruptly funneling money to and colluding with Donald Trump. Father and son are financially and personally tied to a president who traffics in antisemitic tropes and obsessively attacks Jewish voters, whose rhetoric emboldens white nationalists whom he dubs “very fine people,” whose first press secretary dog-whistled Holocaust denial, whose biggest donor made inauguration day Hitler salutes, and who stocked his administration with officials tied to antisemitic extremists, including self-described “Nazi sympathizers.”
No matter to David Ellison, who hosted an “intimate gathering in celebration of the First Amendment” aimed at “honoring the Trump White House.” A free speech dinner for a journalist-attacking, news company suing antisemite? Sure. Cool. Cool cool cool.
You know what antisemitism doesn’t look like?
An artist and media activist calling attention to Oracle’s role in what the U.N. documents as genocide and war crimes, and how that same tech may eventually be used on us. Or warning that Oracle is the biggest financial backer of a merger that would give monopolistic power to two companies with dangerous track records of journalistic censorship, hostility toward diversity, infringement on personal rights to privacy, and funding a racist, misogynist, authoritarian administration.
The moral clarity grossly attributed to Paramount by the Weisenthal Center was provided by Jewish Voices for Peace.
Fire up your bullshit detector
Paramount’s disingenuous frame relies on a lack of critical thinking skills. They want you to unquestioningly buy that their opponents are only criticizing their corporations because David and Larry are Jewish.
Oy. They truly think you’re that stupid.
When we fight media deregulation and concentration, we’re pushing back on government rollbacks of telecom policies meant to protect the public. We’re working to stop an already over-consolidated industry from becoming even more monopolistic, homogeneous, expensive, and dangerous.
With all fair disrespect to Citizens United: corporations are. not. people. Never during a single conversation with Block the Merger organizers — nor in thirty years as a media critic and media activist — have I ever heard one word said or question asked about Big Media owners’ religions. Not by Mark Ruffalo, not by anyone else. Who cares about the Ellisons’ faith? Their actions are the problem. (This video from organizer Jake Hart, this conversation between Norman Eisen and Randi Weingarten, and this essay by Free Press’s Craig Aaron underscore the crucial distinction.)
Paramount’s skillfully Orwellian response to Ruffalo claimed to be “asking for the same good faith we’re extending” because “we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”
This brings us to a moment to lower the temperature, not raise it. We’d rather build than further engage in such rhetoric. This simply exposes the true motivation of some who have advocated opposition to this transaction. On the other hand, our commitment to great content is matched by our commitment to acceptance – to every story, every storyteller, and no blacklists, no exceptions, for anyone.
It was a public relations masterclass. Your media literacy Bullshit Detector should be screeching like a broken car alarm.
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Pretending they wanted to “lower the temperature” while raising it to incendiary levels.
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“No blacklists, no exceptions” from a company that scrapped their D.E.I. programs — and axed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after he called their payout to Donald Trump a “big fat bribe” — to close their previous Skydance merger.
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“Commitment to great content” and “acceptance” from a company that has destroyed the credibility of CBS’s 60 Minutes, the nation’s oldest and most respected investigative journalism broadcast, by censoring meticulously investigated pieces about immigration, and pressuring reporters to insert disinformation into the news to put their thumb on the scale for the Trump administration.
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“We don’t tolerate prejudice” by the same people who fund and honor a president whose hate speech has “led to grave human rights violations,” according to U.N. researchers.
But their biggest scam?
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Insisting they didn’t want to “engage in such rhetoric.”
First time wasn’t a charm
What chutzpah! Truth is, Paramount has been trying and failing for months to use Jews to generate this exact controversy — they just never had a famous face to hang it on until now. Mark became their MacGuffin.
Paramount’s chief legal counsel, Makan Delrahim, dropped a test balloon in the Los Angeles Times in June:
There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views.
His effort? Transparent. Paramount’s goal of hijacking public debate away from growing anti-merger sentiment and toward Israel/Palestine? Womp womp. They generated only two measly news stories beyond that LA Times quote. One, by the Jerusalem News Syndicate…
…included these delicious quotes from Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director member Seth Stern:
“I’m one of many Jews working to stop the Ellisons from throwing American journalism under the bus to appease Donald Trump,” Stern told JNS. “Delrahim’s comment is offensive and ridiculous.”
“What a schmendrik,” he added. “One of the most antisemitic things you can do is claim Jews are a monolith and should all fall in lockstep behind you.”
Stern told JNS that Delrahim should instead “address the Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the Ellisons promised Trump ‘sweeping changes’ at CNN in exchange for merger approval.”
“Nobody is falling for these desperate distractions,” he said.
The New York Post took another bite of Delrahim’s apple with an unhinged story not just echoing Paramount propaganda but adding their own. Based only on anonymous “sources close to the merger” (read: corporate flaks), the Post claimed that the Block the Merger movement is “astroturfed,” “completely driven by antisemitism and socialism” and the DSA, and “organized by a cadre of anti-American groups funded by ultra-leftists including George Soros.”
According to the Post, we don’t really care about media jobs and content, viewpoint diversity, or creative and press freedom:
If it wasn’t the Ellisons, who are known to be pro-Israel and proud of their Judaism this wouldn’t be an issue,” the source added.
Well, well, well… is that a photo caption amplifying a favorite far right antisemitic dog whistle: the conspiracy that Jewish billionaire George Soros is behind anything and everything conservatives don’t like? In the same article that attempts to paint ParaBros merger critics as seething antisemites? Oh, New York Post, never change.
I couldn’t stop laughing when I read that caption. If only media activism came with a big, fat payday from a lefty billionaire! (In all the years I ran Women In Media & News unfunded and without access to health insurance, Santa Soros never left a Looney Tunes-style bag of ca$h on my fire escape.) I was at that early-a.m. protest outside Warner Bros. HQ in NYC when shareholders voted to approve the merger; I paid for my own taxi.
And that was it. No one else bought Delrahim’s antiseminism ploy, nor the Post’s multiple attempts to cast Block the Merger as an “astroturf” operation. Ironically, this August our coalition uncovered a real astroturf op: The brand-spanking-new Neighbors for Strong Communities, which has been sending Californians fear-mongering texts about how they’ll all be unemployed if Big Bad AG Bonta doesn’t drop his antitrust lawsuit and give Paramount what they want.
Their website is rich with weasel words and glittering generalities, but light on any information about who they actually are or how they’re funded. Their AI-powered letter generator did this to Archival Producers Alliance co-founder Rachel Antell’s attempt to tell Bonta to stand strong:
Jews say ENOUGH!
As Adam Rose, Deputy Director of Advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, tells It’s Not You, It’s Media:
Using slurs to smear and silence critics is its own form of hate speech, no matter how carefully they word it through their publicists. How dare they falsely invoke antisemitism for something as selfish as their business interests?
Ironically, the open letter was written by a number of Jews — many of whom happen to be leading the coalition against the merger. Our community recognizes people like the Ellisons and Delrahim as chazzers and gonifs. Put more plainly, they’re an embarrassment to their mothers.
To me, they’re a shanda far di goyim.
Jewish or not, we all need to stay focused on what’s real, what’s necessary.
Paramount wants to shut down public opposition to their structural harms and abuses of power. We cannot let them. Weaponizing false definitions of antisemitism doesn’t help Jewish people, it hurts us.
And anything that distracts from the goal of fully blocking their merger (the worst since I started monitoring media consolidation after the Telecommunications Act of 1996) will hurt us all.
Whether you’re a media activist, a creative, a reporter, or simply a reader or fan of compelling storytelling and unfettered journalism, don’t let Paramount distract you from doing what you can to protect art, press freedom, and democracy.
Aneasy first step: Watch this video from Jane Fonda, W. Kamau Bell, Hannah Einbinder, Bradley Whitford, Rati Gupta, and Kirsten Vangsness. Then sign the petition to block the merger with no concessions.
I’ll keep writing about other ways to be involved at It’s Not You, It’s Media, and you can always ask me questions about ways to plug in to efforts to fight media consolidation.
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FULL OPEN LETTER AND ALL SIGNATORIES:
“Enough!”
We are Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers who have, in response to the outrageous smear campaign against our respected colleague Mark Ruffalo, a simple message to share with the world: Enough! Enough with 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.
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, 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. We all saw this after their Trump-brokered takeover of TikTok — a takeover they openly proclaimed was in large part motivated by their desire to boost pro-Israel propaganda. Larry Ellison personally, with his astonishing $350 million in funding and pledges to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has been Blair’s major backer as Blair assumes an influential role in the Trump-concocted “Board of Peace” takeover of Gaza, a territory which has become an open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies like the ones celebrated by former Oracle CEO (and current Oracle and Paramount board member) Safra Catz.
The AI road to WarnerMount runs through Gaza, and Ellison has often let us know the Orwellian world he has in store for us as he consolidates control over what we watch and how we watch it, knowing that as we watch he and his corrupt cohort will always be watching us: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.”
Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide. Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too? Or that we don’t see the connection between, on the one hand, the criminal impunities that have led the US and Israel into unending disaster and, on the other, the oligarchic powerplays of the Musks, Ellisons, Thiels and others who are working to dismantle our democracy?
But the virulence and falseness of the slanders they direct towards their critics is evidence of the increasing weakness of their position, based as it is on innuendos. Today, more and more people of conscience are joining together, to loudly and univocally proclaim: The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination. That tired playbook has run its course.
We stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo, and with all decent people who are bravely rising and speaking truth to power.
Signatories
Aaron Costa Ganis, Actor
Abbi Jacobson, Actor/Comedian
Alan Snitow, Filmmaker
Alex Winter, Actor/Filmmaker
Alison Klayman, Filmmaker
Alison Leiby, Writer/Comedian
Alissa Weiss, Rabbi
Allie Gross, Writer
Amos Goldberg, Holocaust Historian, Hebrew University
Amy Ziering, Filmmaker
Anat Matar, Snr. Lecturer (Ret.), Tel Aviv University
Andrea Weiss, Filmmaker
Andrue Kahn, Rabbi
Anjuli Kronheim Katz, Advocate
Anna Pollack, Director
Anthony Arnove, Writer/Producer
Ariel Friedlander, Artist
Ariel Wengroff, Artist
Atalia Omer, Professor, University of Notre Dame
Avi Shlaim, Professor (Em.), St Antony’s College
Ayelet Waldman, Author
Barry Trachtenberg, Professor, Wake Forest University
Bella Freud, Designer
Ben Korman, Producer
Ben Moser, Author
Ben Natan, Actor/Producer
Brian A. Kates, Editor
Bruce Cohen, Producer
Camille Lévy Sarfati, Author/Curator
Cat Davis, Rabbi
Chani Nicholas, Astrologer
Charlie Goldensohn, Strategist/Commentator
Charlotte Sheedy, Literary Agent
Cindi Leive, Journalist
Collier Meyerson, Writer
Craig Aaron, Journalist
Dana Kornberg, Assoc. Professor, UC Santa Barabra
Daniel Levy, Political Analyst
David Borenstien, Filmmaker
David Mivasair, Rabbi
David Vine, Author
David Wilson, Filmmaker
David Zirin, Writer
Deborah Eisenberg, Writer
Deborah Kaufman. Filmmaker
Deborah Shaffer, Filmmaker
Debra Winger, Actor
Deidre Fishel, Filmmaker
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, Physician
Einat Weizman, Filmmaker
Emily Kunstler, Filmmaker
Emma Seligman, Filmmaker
Erin Axelman, Filmmaker
Estee Chandler, Radio Host/Producer
Estelle Tarica, Professor, UC Berkeley
Ethan Sacks, Writer
Frances Fisher, Actor
Gabor Maté, Physician/Author
Gili Getz, Photographer
Gina Gershon, Actor
Ginny Suss, Producer
Hana Morgenstern, Assoc. Professor, Newnham College
Hannah Einbinder, Actor
Henry Bean, Screenwriter
Howard Rodman, Screenwriter
Hunter Abrams, Photographer
Idith Korman, Musician/Composer
Ilana Glazer, Actor/Writer/Director
Ilise Cohen, Scholar
Itamar Ziegler, Composer/Musician
James Renton, Professor, Edge Hill University
James Schamus, Filmmaker
James Wilson, Producer
Jamie Zelermeyer, Producer
Jane Schoenbrun, Filmmaker
Jason Kliot, Filmmaker
Jason Rosenberg, Public Health Advocate
Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte, Producer
Jenna Weiss-Berman, Producer
Jennifer L. Pozner, Author
Jeremiah Zagar, Director
Jeremy Yaches, Producer
Jesse Mechanic, Writer
Jill Goldman, Artist
Jillian Neal, Manager
Jo Firestone, Comedian/Actor
Joaquin Phoenix, Actor
Joel Beinin, Professor (Em.), Stanford University
Joel Coen, Filmmaker
Jon Reiss, Filmmaker
Jonathan Feingold, Professor, Boston University School of Law
Jonathan Glazer, Filmmaker
Jonathan Lethem, Writer
Josette Maskin, Musician
Karin Loevy, Professor, NYU School of Law
Kate Berlant, Actor
Kathy Wazana, Filmmaker
Katie Halper, Journalist
Lance Kramer, Producer
Larry Charles, Screenwriter/Director
Laura Kraftowitz, Writer
Leora Barish, Screenwriter
Lex Rofeberg, Rabbi
Libby Lenkinski, Producer
Linda Holtzman, Rabbi
Lindsay Beyerstein, Journalist
Lior Sternfeld, Assoc. Professor, Penn State University
Lisa Cholodenko, Filmmaker
Lonnie Kleinman, Rabbi
Liz Flahive, Screenwriter
Mara Hoffman, Artist
Marc Weiss, Filmmaker
Marianne Hirsch, Professor, Columbia University
Maris Kreizman, Writer
Mark LeVine, Professor, UC Irvine
Mati Shemoelof, Author/Poet
Matt Bernstein, Content Creator
Max Zev Reynolds, Rabbi
Meryl Crean, Rabbi
Michael Greif, Director
Michael J. Drexler, Assoc. Professor, Bucknell University
Michael Skolnik, Organizer
Michael Rothberg, Professor, UCLA
Miranda July, Filmmaker/Writer
Mneesha Gellman, Professor, Emerson College
Molly Crabapple, Author/Artist
Mordechai Liebling, Rabbi
Morgan Bassichis, Writer/Performer
Morgan Spector, Actor
Naomi Klein, Author/Professor
Nathan Thrall, Author
Nicole Morse, Educator
Nina Menkes, Filmmaker
Noa Avishag Schnall, Journalist
Orian Zakai, Assoc. Professor, George Washington University
Orli Matlow, Comedian
Peter Beinart, Journalist
Phyllis Bennis, Writer
Rachel Leah Jones, Filmmaker
Rain Phoenix, Musician
Raphael Greenberg, Professor (Em.), Tel Aviv University
Raz Segal, Assoc. Professor, Stockton University
Rebecca Vilkomerson, Author/Analyst
Rick Perlstein, Author
Rinat Abastado, Rabbinic Student
Roee Rosen, Artist
Romy Soleimani, Make-up Artist
Rosanna Arquette, Actor/Director
Sai Koros, Student Rabbi
Sandi DuBowski, Filmmaker
Sarah Kunstler, Filmmaker
Sarah Schulman, Writer
Sarah Sherman, Comedian/Actor
Sarah Sophie Flicker, Artist
Shira Klein, Assoc. Professor, Chapman University
Sigal Primor, Artist
Simone Zimmerman, Podcast Host
Spencer Ackerman, Author
Steve Quester, Anti-Racism Coach
Steven Katz, Screenwriter
Susan Margolin, Filmmaker
Susan S. Lanser, Professor (Em.), Brandeis University
Tami Gold, Filmmaker
Tamir Sorek, Professor, Penn State University
Tavi Gevinson, Actor/Writer
Ted Hope, Filmmaker
Terri Ginsberg, Asst. Teaching Professor, Rutgers University
Tia Lessen, Filmmaker
Todd Haynes, Filmmaker
Tony Gerber, Filmmaker
Tony Kushner, Screenwriter/Playwright
Udi Aloni, Filmmaker
Udi Raz, Writer
V (formerly Eve Ensler), Playwright/Author
Vanessa Hope, Filmmaker
Vanessa Nunes, Physician
Wallace Shawn, Actor/Playwright
Wendy Ettinger, Filmmaker
Yael Bridge, Filmmaker
Yael Ronen, Director
Yoni Golijov, Filmmaker
Zach Woods, Filmmaker
Zachary Foster, Historian
Zachary Lochman, Professor, NYU
Thank you Jennifer!
