Nelson Peltz Resigns From Wiesenthal Board Over Its Ben & Jerry’s Tweet
Jewish organization called for consumers to shun ice-cream maker following pro-Palestinian posts from its chairman
Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz resigned from his position at the Simon Wiesenthal Center after the Jewish organization urged people not to buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Peltz, who is a board member at Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company, stepped down from the center on Dec. 12, according to people familiar with the matter. His firm, Trian Fund Management, is a Unilever UL 0.54%increase; green up pointing triangle shareholder.
The Wiesenthal Center, which has previously been critical of Ben & Jerry’s support for Palestinians, raised fresh objections to the brand in a post on X earlier this month after its independent chairman denounced Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Peltz was disappointed the center didn’t consult him first about the tweet and called its rabbi to issue his immediate resignation after he learned about it, according to a person familiar with his thinking. He had also been involved with the center since the 1980s, and was ready to depart given his myriad other responsibilities, the person said. Peltz’s resignation wasn’t announced publicly.
On Dec. 8, the Wiesenthal Center’s X account posted a tweet saying Ben & Jerry’s was “justifying” the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas. “No one should spend a penny on their products,” it added.
The tweet featured a photo of Ben & Jerry’s Chairman Anuradha Mittal, who on her private Twitter account has backed a permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Mittal, who also runs an Oakland, Calif., think tank focused on progressive causes, has posted regularly about the conflict.
Ben & Jerry’s hasn’t posted on its own social-media accounts or commented anywhere else about the conflict in Gaza.
The Wiesenthal Center’s tweet said the ice-cream brand was “justifying the mass murderer [sic], raping and torturing of Jewish hostages including children.” After The Wall Street Journal contacted the center and Trian for comment, the tweet was deleted.
Peltz, 81 years old, most recently was chair of the center’s board of governors. He has also been a major donor to the center, which is named after an Austrian Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals.
Mittal said in an interview that she complained about the Wiesenthal Center’s tweet to Unilever, saying it unfairly singles out Ben & Jerry’s and has made her feel unsafe. “For me this is still a live issue,” she said, adding that the tweet’s deletion hasn’t stopped a barrage of hateful emails, X messages and LinkedIn messages being sent to her.
Mittal said she raised concerns about Peltz’s dual positions on the board of Unilever and the Wiesenthal Center, and asked the company to investigate whether Peltz may have breached his fiduciary duty to shareholders given the center’s calls for consumers to stop buying Unilever products.
Before the tweet was deleted, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate dean, told the Journal in a statement that there was no call for an official boycott of Ben & Jerry’s, but that any company or executive who doesn’t “denounce mass rape of women, mass kidnappings, beheadings, holding children and the elderly hostage underground for seven weeks+, we have the right and obligation to call you out!”
Peltz, a longtime activist investor who is currently in the midst of a proxy battle with Disney, joined the Unilever board last year.
Trian last year disclosed it manages funds that own a roughly 1.5% stake in Unilever.
When it acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, Unilever established an unusual governance arrangement with the ice-cream maker. The agreement allows the brand’s independent board to make its own decisions about social causes it chooses to back. The brand’s positions—on Palestinian causes and other issues—have previously prompted some consumers and pension funds to chastise or even boycott Unilever.
Before the Hamas-Israel conflict, Ben & Jerry’s had been vocal about its support for Palestinian causes. In 2021, it said it would end sales of its products in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested East Jerusalem. It said the territory was internationally recognized as illegally occupied.
The Wiesenthal Center at the time placed ads in U.S. Jewish newspapers urging consumers to tell their local grocery store to “stop selling anti-semitic ice cream,” naming Ben & Jerry’s. It also included Unilever on its global antisemitism top 10 list for 2021.
On its website, Ben & Jerry’s addresses the issue with a quote from a newspaper opinion column, in which founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield wrote that, “As Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, we fundamentally reject the notion that it is antisemitic to question the policies of the State of Israel.”
Unilever last year moved to neutralize Ben & Jerry’s decision to halt sales of its products in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested East Jerusalem by selling the ice-cream maker’s Israeli business to a licensee without its permission. Ben & Jerry’s then took its parent company to court, and the two sides struck a settlement agreement.