Tom Divon is an ethnographer of user-platform interactions focusing on creator culture platform affordances and user generated content. His research examines the socio-political subcultures of platforms such as TikTok and Instagram with a focus on intersecting domains. Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish content creators; platform governance and content moderation; and the role of play and trauma in activism within war zones. In addition, Divon’s work explores how artificial intelligence is mythologized, exploited, and weaponized against activists within digital cultures.
Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist, and he taught European history at Boston University for 25 years. Since 2015, he has been an independent scholar who also currently resides in Jerusalem. Specialties include millennial thinking, messianic/apocalyptic expectations, honor-shame culture, communications revolutions, the origins of the modern world. Since 2000 he has been working on the way Western media align their coverage with Jihadi war propaganda—an inexplicably self-destructive tendency.
Peaced Off! is back with a supersized episode that takes up what is being called “Pallywood,” the portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood.” Is it a derogatory term used by pro-Israel commentators to falsely accuse Palestinians of staging suffering and civilian casualties to manipulate the media? Or, is it a global symbol of Palestinian suffering born out of the current state of affairs in which Palestinians lack authentic mainstream media outlets? We spoke to Tom Divon, an ethnographer and media scholar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Richard Landes, a former history professor at Boston University and now an independent historian living in Jerusalem, about the origins of the term and their respective takes on its significance. The resulting discussions were both eye opening and quite troubling, but gave us a lot to ponder and digest.
