Tom Gross
Tom Gross is a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East. Gross was formerly a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. He now works as an opinion journalist and has written for both Arab and Israeli newspapers as well as European and American ones, both liberal and conservative. He also appears as a commentator on the BBC and various Middle Eastern networks.
His politics are mixed. The German newspaper Die Welt described Gross as “A leftist in the fight against left-wing hypocrisy”. In a profile of Gross in the Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, it noted that he started as a non-political entertainment and feature journalist before becoming a political commentator.
Education and family
Gross was educated at Wadham College at Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His father, John Gross, was a distinguished author and critic, and his mother, Miriam Gross, and sister, Susanna Gross, are literary editors. His step-father Sir Geoffrey Owen was editor of the Financial Times. His uncle was Tony Gross, a pioneering fashion optician.Gross’s maternal grandfather, Kurt May, was a German-Jewish lawyer who fled Nazi persecution to Jerusalem, where Gross's mother was born. May later led the legal battle of The United Restitution Organization, which fought to attain restitution from German companies for persecuted Jews, Roma and others, after World War II. May was also a senior advisor to the U.S. chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials. Gross’s maternal grandmother, Vera Feinberg, also escaped Nazi Germany for pre-state Israel, but her parents were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and later to Treblinka where they were gassed to death upon arrival.
Gross has also cited the strong influence during his childhood of his godmother, Sonia Orwell, widow of the writer George Orwell and the model for Orwell's heroine Julia in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gross wrote in The Spectator magazine that Sonia had no children of her own, and “she became almost like a second mother to me”.
Journalistic career
Gross was formerly the Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and for the New York Daily News. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, National Review and Huffington Post in the United States, to The National Post in Canada, to The Australian in Australia, for the Saudi paper Asharq Al-Awsat and to The Times of India.In Britain, he has written for The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Standpoint and Evening Standard, and other publications; in Israel, for Ha’aretz, Ma’ariv and The Jerusalem Post; in Germany for Die Welt; and in Iran, for a number of opposition websites.
Human rights activism
He has criticized the UN for not doing more to promote freedom in countries such as North Korea and Mauritania.. He has also conducted various on stage interviews, including with a French hostage kidnapped by Islamic State in Syria, a Nigerian schoolgirl kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and with the wife of the imprisoned Saudi liberal blogger and political prisoner Raif Badawi.Gross has advocated for the rights of the Roma
, Domari, Kurdish, Yazidi and Rohingya minorities, and disabled people. In 2014, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin wrote that “Tom Gross is probably Europe’s leading observer of the Middle East.” Gross was similarly described in Toronto’s National Post in April 2019.
Media Criticism
Much of his work has concerned the way the international media covers the Middle East. He has been cited on the subject in papers such as The New York Times and interviewed in Haaretz and on television about this. He has been sharply critical of the BBC, arguing that their Middle East coverage is slanted against Israel, and has subjected the coverage of Reuters, The Guardian and CNN and what he termed the “cult of Rachel Corrie” to scrutiny.He has also been critical of The New York Times, both for their general foreign coverage, and historically for what he terms their “lamentable record of not covering the Holocaust.” “The New York Times,” wrote Gross, “possibly because they feared people might -- wrongly -- think of it as a ‘Jewish’ paper, made sure reports were brief and buried inside the paper. During World War II, no article about the Jews’ plight under the Nazis ever qualified as the Times’ leading story of the day.”
Israel-Palestine
Gross has consistently supported the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel – and suggested that it is possible one may even be created under the Trump presidency. But he has said that “to be viable and successful it is not only a question of what Israel will give the Palestinians, but of the Palestinians themselves engaging in good governance,” and warned that “there is no point in creating a new Palestinian state if it will primarily be used as a launching ground for armed attacks on Israel, which would be likely to in turn only lead to a much bloodier war between Israelis and Palestinians than anything we have witnessed in the past.” He has also written about the Jews of the Arab world.Prague
Gross has also lived and worked in Prague, where he served as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. He helped launch the Czech edition of Elle magazine, the first international glossy magazine in post-communist central and eastern Europe. In addition, he wrote a regular op-ed column for The Prague Post and op-eds for the Czech daily Lidové Noviny. He has acted as a consultant to the Prague Jewish museum, and wrote the museum's guide for visitors. In The Guardian Gross has been critical of the fact that Prague still has no central state-funded Holocaust memorial, unlike most other European capital cities from which Jews were deported.Work on Roma
Tom Gross has also campaigned on behalf of the Roma. “This is one of the most painful and disturbing problems in Europe today, though it is often neglected or misreported by the mainstream media,” he wrote.For two years, based in Prague, he served as a special advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the plight of Czech Roma, mainly relating to citizenship issues arising as a result of the breakup of Czechoslovakia. He criticized the internationally renowned liberal icon and playwright Václav Havel, in columns in The Spectator and The Prague Post, for not doing enough to help Roma while he served as Czech president.
Television and radio
Tom Gross has worked on a number of television programs and documentary films, including BBC TV specials on Czech Roma, and on Sudeten Germans. On the Middle East, he has appeared as a commentator on BBC World news, CNN, Fox News, and NPR. He has been interviewed on international politics on Sky News Arabia, i24 News, Russia Today, TRT World Turkey, Israel Channel 13 and BBC Arabic.Books
Gross is co-author of Out of Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine and of The Time Out Guide to Prague. Out of Tune was named the most important biography of a troubled genius by The Huffington Post in April 2011.Gross has contributed essays to a number of books, including Those Who Forget The Past, and worked as a consultant on Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, and as an editor on Germany and its Gypsies: A post-Auschwitz ordeal.