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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)