In April 1915, during World War I, Fritz Haber stood at Ypres, having personally directed Germany’s preparations to release chlorine gas from thousands of cylinders toward Allied trenches. He did not invent chlorine, though he championed the method and became the principal architect of Germany’s chemical weapons program.
A Jewish chemist who converted to Protestant Christianity in 1892, Haber made himself indispensable to the German war machine and believed that conversion and usefulness would bring full admission to German society. Nobody held a gun to his head, but calling his choice entirely free is inaccurate. He came of age at a time and place where Jewish emancipation remained conditional, conversion eased advancement and even a qualified Jew found the officer corps closed to him. The system helped engineer his choice.
I note Haber not to relitigate chemical warfare but to name a recurring pattern in Jewish public life: people convinced that talent or institutional standing can purchase exemption from burdens other Jews carry. I use him as the historical spine for a critique of modern figures like comedian-turned-political-commentator Jon Stewart, whose comfort inside dominant institutions lets them wave away mainstream Jewish concerns that inconvenience them.
This is a phenomenon Jewish history repeatedly produces under pressure, often called the “court Jew” function.
Historically, court Jews served European rulers as intermediaries, sometimes protecting Jewish communities while enjoying privileges dependent entirely on princely favor. Haber was not literally a court Jew, but a modern analogue: a Jew whose standing inside a dominant institution reassured him that other Jews’ grievances need not trouble him.
Hollywood has repeatedly produced its own versions.
On Aug. 21, actor Mark Ruffalo, campaigning against Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, claimed that the merger would give too much media power to Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. His case rested on Oracle’s relationship with none other than the Israel Defense Forces and a 2024 remark by Safra Catz, then Oracle’s CEO and now a sitting Paramount board member, about technologies Oracle made available to Israel.
Ruffalo cast Catz as gleeful about a “genocide” built on an “apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle,” warning that the technology could eventually be turned on Americans and framing those involved as uniquely perfidious.
That is not merely a description of Ruffalo’s post. It describes the antisemitic trope itself: a Jewish executive’s words falsely recast as gloating over mass murder; a Jewish-founded company transformed into the hidden machinery behind atrocity; a Jewish father and son portrayed as engineering ever-greater control over what the public sees and hears.
Ruffalo could have argued that Oracle’s military contracts are objectionable. Instead, he turned a sitting member of Paramount’s own board into a portrait of a Jewish woman savoring atrocity; made her company the engine of a fabricated apartheid system; and then wired that machinery into a Jewish family’s expanding media empire.
The names and quotations were arranged inside an ancient conspiratorial frame: This is what the “Elders of Zion” genre looks like after a wardrobe change.
More than 180 Jewish names told the world that a familiar antisemitic trope could be discounted.
Paramount identified the trope correctly. So did the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Creative Community for Peace and Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, all of which condemned Ruffalo’s remarks as antisemitic.
Within days, more than 180 Jewish artists, writers, directors and public figures, including Joel Coen, Hannah Einbinder and Naomi Klein, signed a letter titled “Enough!”
The letter didn’t say enough about the tropes or about portraying a Jewish executive as a gleeful genocidaire. Rather, enough with people naming the trope.
The signatories went beyond defending Ruffalo’s right to criticize Israel or the merger. They endorsed his linkage of Catz, Oracle, Gaza and the Ellisons’ media power, describing it as a “larger project of tech-driven domination,” Gaza as an “open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing,” and Ellison and others as a “corrupt cohort.” Then they dismissed concerns about antisemitic tropes as a smear.
The demand for silence ran in only one direction.
That is the court Jew function at work—not private belief, which no one can know, but public reassurance. More than 180 Jewish names told the world that mainstream Jewish alarm over a familiar trope could safely be discounted.
The analogy is not that these signatories are Fritz Haber or Hollywood is Wilhelmine Germany. It is broader: Jewish history repeatedly produces people who acquire or preserve standing within dominant institutions partly by reassuring those institutions that objections from other Jews need not be heard.
Some “Enough!” signatories undoubtedly acted from sincere conviction; others may have understood which position carries greater social currency in their circles. It does not matter. Someone can sincerely believe an antisemitic trope is harmless while lending Jewish identity to making that trope easier to use.
The defense also slides between two claims in something closer to a motte-and-bailey fallacy than a strawman. In his Aug. 22 response, Ruffalo retreated to the defensible proposition that criticizing an Israeli prime minister or military contract is not equivalent to criticizing Jews. Of course not.
But the “Enough!” motto defends the bailey: that connecting Gaza, Oracle and Ellison power to Hollywood consolidation was legitimate, as Ruffalo framed it. That evades the objection. The question was never whether Oracle, Israel or the merger could be criticized. It was how Ruffalo assembled that criticism.
The letter therefore does something consequential: It manufactures a permission slip—a citable fact that more than 180 Jews declared Ruffalo’s framing unobjectionable, available to anyone seeking cover for depicting a Jewish executive as the hidden engine of supposed Israeli evil. A trope does not require most Jews to bless it, only enough prominent names.
Ruffalo ignored the Emirati, Saudi and Qatari investment in the same merger. Pretending that the objection prohibits criticism of a military contract is precisely the deflection the court Jew has performed throughout history.
Haber died in Basel in 1934, exiled from the country he had served, having learned too late that usefulness is not belonging and that any exemption purchased through service, even ideological conversion, remains revocable. Every court Jew believes his court is the exception. None has been proved right for long.
The signatories to “Enough!” may believe history’s lesson cannot reach an industry built in no small part by Jews. History counsels otherwise. The bargain never pays out as expected, and when the ledger is finally read, it does not ask how sincerely the vouching was meant.
It asks what was vouched for and who was left standing outside the court when it mattered.
