Born in London in 1934, David was evacuated to the countryside with his mother, Hetty, during the Blitz. In the early 1950s he served for two years in the Royal Air Force. Looking for new adventures, he sailed to the United States on board the ocean liner of the same name, together with his friend Ronnie Behar. In 1955, he began his working life in America as a debt collector for Household Finance. In the fall, they went to Florida. At Miami Beach, David worked as a bell hop at the Green Heron Hotel, where they refused Jews. When they asked him what kind of name “Paletz” was, he told them, in his best British accent, that it was Scottish.
After spending the winter in Miami, the friends made their way to Los Angeles, where David worked for Pacific Mutual Life Insurance during the day, and studies at Los Angeles City College at night before transferring to UCLA, where he earned his BA in 1961, his MA in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Political Science in 1970. In LA, he met his wife Darcy Cohen (1933-1984), acquired a 1953 MG TD, and discovered Mexico, bullfighting, and Mexican food. In such close proximity to Hollywood, he also developed his passion for film, editor of the Graduate Student newspaper as well as occasional film reviewer for the UCLA Daily Bruin. In 1962, he became a US citizen.
In 1965 David received an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship, and with Darcy, he left for Washington, where he worked on Capitol Hill, and at the Brookings Institution. In Washington, he worked on his Ph.D. dissertation on Congressional Conference Committees.
In 1967, David was offered a position at Duke University, where he stayed until his retirement at the age of 80, in 2014. In Durham, Darcy worked for WUNC. Later she became the first manager of the newly refurbished Carolina Theater, where she worked until her death in 1984. David and Darcy's two children were born in Durham.
At Duke, David created the Political Science Department’s Internship Program in Washington, D.C. In Durham, he became co-chair of the selection and awards committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. His passion for film had a significant impact on his teaching and research. David’s course on Politics and the Media ran for five hours one night a week over two semesters. Long before the advent of digital media, he would show feature and documentary films, encourage students to make their own videos as class projects, and often co-authored papers with students.
During his many years at Duke, David taught courses on American Government, the Presidency, and Interest Groups. He also created a number of original courses such as Politics and the Libido, Film and Politics, Politics and the Media in the United Kingdom, Documentary Film, Buster Keaton, and The Hollywood Ten and the Blacklist. For the latter, he brought blacklisted writers and directors to Duke. In 1984, he won the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, Duke’s highest teaching award.
In addition to the usual suspects (lawyers, doctors, professors, government officials, and journalists), his students have become a university president, judges, documentarians, poets, artists, a storyteller, TV anchors, members of Congress, White House aides, Olympians, and professional athletes. When David retired in 2014, his former students came from all over the country to celebrate him. In 2011, two of his former students, Ann Pelham and her daughter Catherine Cullen, endowed a fund in David’s name to support innovative teaching at Duke. David has taken pleasure in serving on the selection committee every year since. To David’s great delight, the David L. Paletz Fund for Innovative Teaching continues to receive donations from David’s students and friends, and others interested in encouraging original and creative undergraduate teaching.
In 1999, David married Toril Moi, a Professor of Literature at Duke. Together, they went to the theater, watched movies, traveled the world, enjoyed life, love, and learning, and built a house in Durham.
As a scholar, David helped to found the field of politics and the media. He has written widely on government, authority, politics and media, elections, public opinion, and film. David has been a Fulbright Fellow twice, in Denmark, and The Netherlands. He served as the editor of the journal Political Communication from 2002 to 2008, and received the 2012 David Swanson Career Achievement Award from the Political Communication Sections of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.
To share David’s scholarship, we have uploaded some of David’s own favorite articles, as well as links to some of his books.
Throughout his life, David thrived on the music of Bach, Handel, and Mozart, and on modern jazz. He loved going to the theater in England. He always tried to catch new productions of plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. His special favorites were Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, and Uncle Vanya. He treasured the achievements and love of Darcy and Toril, of his children Gabriel Michael and Susannah Batia Felicity Paletz, and his granddaughter Dalia Rafaelle Hatty Paletz.
