On Sept. 17, a group of roughly 30 Paramount Skydance employees sent a letter to the office of CEO David Ellison and other senior executives slamming the company for “aligning” with “a genocide in Gaza and of the Palestinian people.” After two weeks without receiving a response, the group followed up on Oct. 1 with a list of demands, including a call for Paramount to donate $1 million to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in order to match its 2023 donation of the same amount to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel.
The employee group, which calls itself both Paramount Employees of Conscience and Paramount Employees for Human Rights, operates anonymously; members did not sign their names on the letter “out of fear of retaliation, doxxing and elimination given the company’s upcoming, well publicized layoffs,” they tell Variety. However, the group does specify that it includes staffers “from every business unit within the enterprise and across all levels of seniority,” including at the executive level. (Variety has spoken to multiple members of the group to confirm their identities, employment at Paramount and involvement with the letter.)
Paramount Employees of Conscience tells Variety that company leadership has not acknowledged receipt of either message. A Paramount representative declined Variety’s request for comment.
Earlier this month, an organization called Film Workers for Palestine circulated a pledge not to “work with Israeli film institutions …that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people,” which has since been signed by more than 5,000 people in the entertainment industry including A-listers such as Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix. Shortly thereafter, Paramount released a statement condemning that pledge for “silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality.” (In response, Film Workers for Palestine emphasized that the pledge is intended to target companies and organizations, not individual Israelis.)
The following week, Paramount Employees of Conscience wrote to several company leaders to call the statement a “dangerous and intentional distortion” that “does not represent the employees of this company.” The letter reads, “Paramount’s claim that the Pledge is an attempt to silence Israeli artists is a purposeful misrepresentation of the boycott and its objective. We applaud the FWP for pushing back against this bad-faith argument.”
In the letter, the employees accuse Paramount of hypocrisy, pointing to the company’s mission to “promote mutual understanding” as stated in its response to the boycott. The letter reads, “How can a company with this supposed creative mission actively ignore, suppress, and silence internal calls for years to champion stories that shed a light on the reality that marginalized and excluded communities, particularly Palestinians, face every day?”
Paramount Employees of Conscience claims that staffers across the company have “meaningfully attempted to engage Paramount leadership with data-driven and objectively strategic business recommendations” to acquire projects from Palestinian creators, such as the documentary “No Other Land,” which never found a U.S. distributor despite winning the best documentary Oscar earlier this year, and the short form news series “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive,” which was eventually picked up by Al Jazeera’s AJ+ and won Emmy and Peabody awards in 2024.
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Instead, the letter claims that Paramount has distributed what it calls “one-sided stories,” noting the documentary projects “We Will Dance Again,” “The Children of October 7,” and “As1One: The Israeli-Palestinian Pop Music Journey” in particular. (“As1One” follows a boy band made up of four Israelis and two Palestinians, which was conceptualized by American music executives and formed in Israel. “We Will Dance Again” and “The Children of October 7” focus on Israeli children and attendees of Israel’s Nova Music Festival.)
As such, the list of demands sent to Paramount leadership on Oct. 1 includes “a commitment to producing, acquiring, and distributing content that represents not just the perspective and experience of the Palestinian people, but to also amplify Jewish voices that speak out against how the Israeli government misrepresent their culture and religious beliefs.” The group additionally demands that Paramount “guarantee that there will be no retaliation or punishment made against Paramount employees who speak out against genocide and apartheid.”
Along with Ellison, the letter and the demands were sent to Paramount Skydance president Jeff Shell, chief strategy and operating officer Andy Gordon, chief communications officer Melissa Zukerman, head of HR Jim Sterner, direct-to-consumer chair Cindy Holland, co-chair of Paramount Pictures and chair of Paramount Television Dana Goldberg, co-chair of Paramount Pictures and vice chair of platforms Josh Greenstein and TV chair George Cheeks.
Read the full letter below, followed by the list of demands.
To Paramount Leadership:
As Paramount employees from every business unit within the enterprise and across all levels of seniority, we firmly reject the leadership team’s condemnation of the Film Workers for Palestine Pledge.
From the hypocrisy of the purported creative mission to the intentional misrepresentation of the FWP Pledge, the statement made by Paramount leadership does not represent the employees of this company. In condemning the Pledge, you are aligning yourselves with systems of apartheid, occupation, and what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Holocaust scholars, independent experts commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, and countless other organizations, including Israeli institutions like B’Tselem, have recognized as a genocide in Gaza and of the Palestinian people.
As Paramount employees, we refuse to have our labor used to endorse complicity in the brutalization and erasure of an entire population. We do not and will not support the leadership team’s attempts to align a publicly traded American company with the intentions, actions, and propaganda arm of a foreign government.
As the parent company of a massive news organization in CBS, it is incredibly telling that Paramount chooses to say nothing as hundreds of journalists are targeted and murdered with impunity in Gaza while simultaneously publicly chastising film workers for choosing whom they would like to work with based on shared values.
We stand with our colleagues of conscience across the industry who are demanding justice, and we affirm the call for a boycott of institutions that are complicit in war crimes, apartheid, and genocide as a legitimate, ethical, and necessary act of solidarity.
The very thesis of your statement condemning the Pledge is rooted in blatant hypocrisy:
“At Paramount, we believe in the power of storytelling to connect and inspire people, promote mutual understanding, and preserve the moments, ideas, and events that shape the world we share. This is our creative mission.”
How can a company with this supposed creative mission actively ignore, suppress, and silence internal calls for years to champion stories that shed a light on the reality that marginalized and excluded communities, particularly Palestinians, face every day? Stories for which there is clear, global, and growing audience demand? As employees of this company, we are increasingly galvanized to push back against the demonstrable hypocrisy of this statement.
For years, a growing and varied coalition of employees has meaningfully attempted to engage Paramount leadership with data-driven and objectively strategic business recommendations to acquire and distribute award-winning stories like No Other Land and It’s Bisan From Gaza And I’m Still Alive that meet the creative mission stated in your condemnation statement—stories that truly promote mutual understanding of events that shape the world we share.
How can a company with this purported mission actively and exclusively platform Israeli perspectives, while silencing Palestinian voices? Budgets and resources have been diverted from existing programming and marketing priorities, only investing in one-sided stories like We Will Dance Again, Children of Oct 7th, and As1One that did not lead to any material business success. Rather, these projects contributed to the organization’s seemingly perpetual reputational decline and furthered its disconnect from audiences.
In addition to the hypocrisy of platforming one perspective while suppressing another—in direct opposition to the creative mission you purport—the second half of the company’s condemnation statement is equally disingenuous in its dangerous and intentional distortion of the Pledge:
“We do not agree with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers. Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace. The global entertainment industry should be encouraging artists to tell their stories and share their ideas with audiences throughout the world. We need more engagement and communication — not less.”
Paramount’s claim that the Pledge is an attempt to silence Israeli artists is a purposeful misrepresentation of the boycott and its objective. We applaud the FWP for pushing back against this bad-faith argument, and we appreciate Hannah Einbinder for using her Emmy win presser as a platform to reiterate the truth: “the Film Workers for Palestine boycott does not boycott individuals. It only boycotts institutions that are directly complicit in the genocide.” We also commend Javier Bardem for rejecting this while speaking to Variety on the Emmy red carpet: “Film Workers for Palestine do not target any individuals based on identity. The targets are those film companies and institutions that are complicit and are white-washing or justifying the genocide and its apartheid regime. We do stand with those who are helping and being supportive of the oppressed people.”
As Paramount employees who support the Pledge, we believe it is critical to underscore this point: the boycott is not an attack on filmmakers. It explicitly draws inspiration from Filmmakers United Against Apartheid, the organization co-founded in 1987 by Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese and comprised of more than 100 prominent filmmakers who refused to screen their films in apartheid South Africa. Similarly, we are confident that when history looks back at the Film Workers for Palestine Pledge, it will do so with a similar respect for its foresight and the humanitarian insight with which the FUAA Pledge is regarded.
When a powerful media conglomerate attempts to intimidate film workers for exercising their freedom of expression to condemn war crimes in this manner—who is really doing the silencing?
Signed,
Paramount Employees for Human Rights
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EMPLOYEE SAFETY: We call on Paramount Leadership to acknowledge the harm caused to Paramount employees by their condemnation of the FWP Pledge. We call for them to commit to a guarantee that there will be no retaliation or punishment made against Paramount employees who speak out against genocide and apartheid.
CONTENT & STORYTELLING: We call on leadership to actually deliver on their creative mission to “promote mutual understanding” by making a commitment to producing, acquiring, and distributing content that represents not just the perspective and experience of the Palestinian people, but to also amplify Jewish voices that speak out against how the Israeli government misrepresent their culture and religious beliefs.
HUMANITARIAN SUPPORT: We call on Paramount leadership to match the $1M in corporate donations made in October 2023 to Israeli organizations by donating $1M in humanitarian relief to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a non-profit providing medical and humanitarian aid to children.
From Variety US