Richard Landes, PhD

Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist and taught history at the University of Pittsburgh and Boston University. His early work focused on the period around 1000 C.E.—a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West) and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations. After 2000 and the onset of Global Jihad, he focused on apocalyptic millennial activity in the 21st century and the Western news media’s unconscious role in encouraging such trends. In 2005, he launched a media-oversight project called the Second Draft in order to look at what the news media call their “first draft of history.” His groundbreaking investigations into the 2000 Muhammad al-Durah hoax and its disastrous consequences brought him to coin the now well-known phrase “Pallywood.” Since January of 2005 he has been blogging at The Augean Stables.

His most recent publications on those topics include Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011); and Salem on the Thames: Moral Panic, Anti-Zionism, and the Triumph of Hate-Speech at Connecticut College (Academic Studies Press, 2019). In 2022, he published his analysis of the calamitous turn of events among the Western intelligentsia around 2000—the response to the al-Aqsa Intifada and 9/11—and its impact on the ability of democracies to defend themselves: Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press). As one reviewer put it: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this book saw October 7 coming from a mile away.”