FIRST ON FOX — A rabbinic group is calling out some Jewish entertainers for “whitewashing antisemitism” by supporting actor Mark Ruffalo after his harsh opposition to the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount merger.

More than 170 Jewish entertainers and artists signed a letter Tuesday “proudly” voicing support for Ruffalo after he was accused of antisemitism when criticizing the proposed $111 billion merger.

Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, said it typically does not respond when a Hollywood figure says something it finds hateful about Jews or Israel. But the group believes Ruffalo’s comments forced a group of Jewish Hollywood figures that have “little knowledge of Jewish history or the nature of antisemitism” to “deny obvious bigotry.”

“Ruffalo did not merely criticize a business deal. In an August 22 Instagram post tying the Paramount-Skydance/Warner Bros. merger to Oracle’s work with Israel, Ruffalo claimed that the Ellison family — who are Jewish — were ‘powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world,’ and framed a corporate transaction as built on ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid.’ That is not policy criticism, but mischaracterization of civil rights for Jews and Arabs as racism, and the rescue of Jewish hostages as murder,” the Coalition for Jewish Values said in a statement.

“Nonetheless, more than 170 Jewish entertainment figures rushed to sign a letter dismissing the antisemitism charge as an ‘outrageous smear campaign.’ To be certain, they are entitled to their ignorant and misguided views,” the statement continued. “They are not, however, entitled to be taken seriously when they engage in whitewashing antisemitism, or suggest that those with sufficient discernment to recognize the oldest of anti-Jewish tropes should deny the obvious.”

The group said that “America set itself apart from much of the world precisely by declaring hatred of Jews unwelcome, regardless of who dressed it up as righteousness,” and feels “Ruffalo would do well to remember that he owes much of his career to the Founding Fathers who made America so hospitable, and the Jews who fled persecution in Europe to build new homes for their children in a friendlier land.”

“It is some of those children, working in New York in the early 20th century, who created Marvel Comics and invented The Incredible Hulk,” the group said.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told Fox News Digital that Ruffalo’s remarks were “embarrassing” and that Ruffalo presented a “mythical inversion” of the situation in the Middle East.

Ruffalo was accused of invoking “antisemitic tropes” by Paramount after the Marvel star shared a video from August of Safra Catz, an Oracle executive vice chair and Paramount board member, discussing technology Oracle used to assist Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.

He linked Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, to financing behind the proposed acquisition and suggested the merger would be used to push “oppression.”

“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 said. “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.”

Among the Jewish artists who signed the letter were Abbi Jacobson, Alex Winter, Gina Gershon, Ilana Glazer, James Schamus, Joel Coen, Larry Charles, Kate Berlant, Naomi Klein, Sarah Sherman, Jane Schoenbrun, Todd Haynes and Tony Kushner, denied Ruffalo‘s comments were antisemitic, arguing that the executives Ruffalo criticized had “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 celebrities also argued that a majority of American Jews now believe that Israel committed war crimes against Gaza, with a significant portion believing Israel is guilty of genocide. They called for an end to “spurious charges of antisemitism” against people like Ruffalo.

Ruffalo previously denied pushing antisemitism in a statement to Fox News Digital after Paramount’s original condemnation.

“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” 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.”

The proposed transaction would place CNN, HBO and Warner Bros. studio assets under the Ellison family’s control. A coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it on antitrust grounds, and the companies agreed not to close until five days after a court ruling on the merits or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.

Fox News Digital reached out to Ruffalo’s representatives for additional comment.

Fox News Digital’s Lindsay Kornick and CJ Womack contributed to this report.

Photo: Mark Ruffalo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

SURFSIDE (VINnews) — Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds joined local elected officials, community leaders and residents Monday for a “Bagels with Byron” event at Café Vert.

Bryan Leib hosted the informal gathering, which drew five mayors, three police chiefs, four rabbis and other activists. Leib said the meeting highlighted collective community efforts rather than any single individual.

Among those attending were Surfside Mayor Shlomo Danzinger, Bal Harbour Mayor Seth Salver, Bay Harbor Islands Mayor Isaac Salver, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner and Sunny Isles Beach Mayor Larisa Svechin. Aventura Commissioners Gustavo Blachman and Paul Kruss also participated, as did Commissioner David Weingot.

Rabbis Lipskar, Matz, Parnes and Rosenfeld were present, along with community figures including Tila Falic Levi, Gabe Groisman, Jared Firestone, Ilan Sinelnikov, Robert Rosenfeld, Nadav Alkoby, Adam Thompson, Gila Brand Stern, Jonathan Greenwald, Martin Karp, Andre Roitman and Dovid Teles.

The stop was part of Donalds’ ongoing Bagels with Byron series. Leib and others framed the event as a show of local unity under the slogan “Keep Florida Free.”

Photo courtesy of VINnews.com

On Friday night, Aug. 14, a man allegedly hit a 63-year-old woman and spat upon and heat-butted a 65-year-old security guard at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. Two days later, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani began a weeklong “planned vacation with his family in upstate New York,” according to City Hall.

JNS asked Jewish leaders in the city whether they thought that the mayor, who has been widely accused of fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, ought to have canceled his vacation to stand with Jewish New Yorkers after the attack at the synagogue and less than a month after a visibly Jewish man was stabbed near an Upper West Side synagogue by a man who, witnesses say, yelled “Allahu akbar.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, founding executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS that the question is not if Mamdani should be taking a weeklong vacation, but “how soon he will retire or be retired.”

“Hateful violence starts from hateful incitement, and he has been inciting violence against our community since long before he took office,” he said.

Read the full article at JNS

Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, warned that the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party endangers the American Dream and the nation’s future.

In a Fox News appearance on Monday, Menken described the DSA as a dangerous movement whose ideology and recent actions pose a serious threat to core American values and the country’s long-term stability.

Menken has previously labeled the DSA “objectively antisemitic.” He issued that characterization after DSA co-chair Megan Romer told The New Yorker that the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel were “largely inevitable,” remarks that drew widespread condemnation from pro-Israel organizations.

The Coalition for Jewish Values is the largest rabbinic public-policy organization in the United States. Menken’s comments come amid heightened concerns in Jewish communities about the DSA’s expanding political footprint and its positions on Israel and related issues.

Photo: Rabbi Yaakov Menken, courtesy of Coalition for Jewish Values

BALTIMORE (VINnews)— The Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,500 traditional Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, announced Monday the appointment of former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Irit Tratt to its Advisory Board, along with three new professional staff members.

Friedman, who served as ambassador during the Trump administration and worked to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance, said he was proud to join the board.

“CJV represents a unique voice in public policy, articulating Jewish values with clarity and authenticity,” Friedman said. “I believe what they are doing is critical for America’s future, and I am proud to join its Advisory Board.”

Also joining the Advisory Board is Irit Tratt, a national board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition and a board member of the Jerusalem News Syndicate and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. She also serves on the steering committee of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

“At this pivotal moment for Jews in America and around the world, principled leadership is essential,” Tratt said. “I am proud to join the CJV Board and to help advance an agenda rooted in traditional Jewish values, moral clarity and an unwavering commitment to Israel.”

The organization also named Isabella Brannon as director of legal affairs, Shaya Gedz as director of federal affairs and Rabbi Meir Levin as director of external relations.

“These appointments represent an important step forward for CJV as we expand our national presence and strengthen our ability to advocate for Jewish values and the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, CJV’s executive vice president. “Our new staff bring valuable experience, energy and commitment to our work, while Ambassador Friedman and others are now offering their extraordinary insight and leadership to our Advisory Board. At a time of rising antisemitism and growing hostility toward both Israel and Jewish values, their voices and counsel will be invaluable.”

Photo: U.S. Department of State, public domain.

The co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) group is receiving sharp backlash for saying on Friday that the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in Israel was mostly “inevitable.”

During an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, DSA co-chair Megan Romer was questioned about democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who attended an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas rally the day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in 2023, and was pressed on whether she would have attended if she were in her position.

“I think that Oct. 7 was largely inevitable,” she replied. “If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants —”

Pro-Israel groups condemned her comments.

Executive Vice President for Coalition for Jewish Values, Rabbi Yaakov Menken, called the DSA “objectively antisemitic.”

“She used a mythological inversion of reality to justify both a murderous pogrom and an ongoing plan of starvation, torture, rape, and murder,” Menken said.

Read the full article at Fox News

Also published in Yahoo News.

Photo: Screenshot of Megan Romer interview.

Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.

In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge. On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.

Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.

While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.

“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”

Read the full article at Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Also published in Times of Israel.

Rabbinic law operates on a principle that “a man may not make himself out to be evil,” but the Talmud also states that “silence is like agreement.” That means, two Orthodox rabbis told JNS, that it’s complicated what Jewish tradition has to say about Dr. Anthony Fauci declining to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing last week.

Fauci is a former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to former U.S. President Joe Biden, who pardoned Fauci on Jan. 19, 2025. The doctor’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the focus of the Senate panel hearing.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS that he “was never as liable to believe conspiracy theories about what Dr. Fauci knew about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as I am after he refused to testify regarding the color of his tie.”

Menken, the group’s founding chief executive, noted the Talmudic statement that “a man may not make himself out to be evil.”

“That, however, refers to Jewish law exempting a person from bringing a fine, penalty or capital punishment upon himself through his own admission of guilt,” he said. “A person refusing to testify is quite different, as is the case here.”

“A person should be forthright and honest, and he made himself out to be someone with something to hide,” he told JNS.

Read the full article at JNS

Photo: C-SPAN Screenshot.

Nine months after the Heritage Foundation came under fire for defending Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with a neo-Nazi, the conservative think tank is facing fresh scrutiny over accusations that it has enabled an extreme culture in which new hires feel free to question the Holocaust and to engage in historically revisionist debates about World War II, with no apparent internal policing from leadership.

Former Heritage employees, who had been part of a mass staff exodus stoked by its president’s refusal to disavow Carlson for hosting the neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes on his podcast last October, told The New York Times Magazine in a newly published investigation that they encountered troubling debates during their time at the organization over issues like “whether the Holocaust happened or not” and “who was the bad guy and who were the good guys” in the war against Hitler.

Andrew Hale, a trade policy analyst at Heritage who left in January to join a rival think tank launched by former Vice President Mike Pence, recalled that prior to departing he had found new hires were fixated on antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Holocaust and Israel of the sort popularized by Fuentes, Carlson and Candace Owens, the extreme-right podcast host.

Hale confirmed to Jewish Insider in an interview on Wednesday that new, particularly younger, staffers at Heritage “openly said things which were antisemitic, whether they realized it or not,” crediting their views to an obsession with far-right social media channels.

“The Heritage Foundation had an opportunity to combat antisemitism and misogyny but instead they chose to hire people with these views,” Hale argued, while claiming that the think tank’s “original goals have been subverted under the current leadership” and is now “a force for antisemitism and misogyny.”

Brian Phillips, a Heritage spokesperson, called Hale’s claim about the Holocaust debate “absurd” but did not address related allegations from former staffers, whom the think tank sought to discredit as “self-serving, bitter and vindictive” in a statement to the Times Magazine.

“There is no debate at the Heritage Foundation whether the Holocaust happened and our record opposing antisemitism is long, consistent and public,” he said in a brief email statement to JI, sharing a link to a page on Heritage’s website detailing such efforts.

The foundation, which had long been influential to Republican administrations, has found itself on the defensive after its president, Kevin Roberts, posted a controversial video to social media last fall in which he dismissed Carlson’s critics as part of a “venomous coalition,” among other terms widely interpreted as antisemitic tropes.

“Heritage is catering to a conspiratorial streak popular with Gen Z Republicans, perhaps out of the belief that it’s the future of the party,” Daniel Samet, a fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and Middle East policy, told JI. “It’s one thing to have serious heterodox views. It’s another to spew dreck about Jews. Heritage is failing to draw a line in the sand.”

Among those who left the organization over their discomfort with Roberts’ decision and handling of the fallout were the leaders of an antisemitism task force that opted to sever ties with the think tank last November, even as they voiced hope to “collaborate” again.

Late last month, Luke Moon, a conservative Christian activist and co-chair of the task force, returned to Heritage as a part-time visiting fellow to support its “efforts to combat antisemitism,” the organization said in a statement.

Moon has said he chose to join the organization after Yoram Hazony, an Israeli American political theorist and national conservative leader who has denounced Carlson as antisemitic, became a member of its board in May.

But Moon said on Wednesday his recent experience had been “the opposite” of the internal culture that former staffers had described to The Times. “They’re almost a little overzealous to have me there,” he told JI. “There’s a real frustration in the reputation being tarnished.”

Still, others who left the think tank said that they remained unconvinced Roberts had meaningfully reckoned with his remarks. Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values who resigned from the antisemitism task force last year, said that Roberts had not distanced himself from the rhetoric he used in his defense of Carlson.

“Anyone who thinks I belong to a ‘venomous coalition’ either doesn’t understand antisemitism or is a part of spreading it,” Menken told JI. “Heritage cannot combat antisemitism and endorse it at the same time.”

Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who also resigned from Heritage last year, said he had “not seen any public or private action taken by” the think tank “to adequately address” concerns over antisemitism that precipitated departures. “Until changes are made, I’m not sure how Heritage can be seen as a credible partner in the fight against antisemitism,” he told JI.

While Moon acknowledged that there were “certainly” issues at Heritage last fall, he said the think tank no longer employed problematic staffers like the former chief of staff who had written Roberts’ scripted comments about Carlson.

“There’s an explicit and very clear expectation on me to take on antisemitism on the right,” he said, adding that Heritage had also hired a researcher to help him with such work. “They’ve been very clear to me where they stand on antisemitism.”

Photo: Kevin Roberts 2025 by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The only freedom that Arabs lack in Israel, which they do have in the rest of the Arab world, is… the freedom to kill Jews.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken provides a contrasting view of civil liberties, stating that Arab citizens living within Israel possess a full suite of democratic and social rights.