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 in English, BBC Arabic, and various Middle Eastern and other 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 Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat in 2019, it noted that he started as a non-political entertainment and feature journalist before becoming a political commentator. Long involved in discreet behind-the-scenes bridge-building meetings between officials and activists from Israel and nations throughout the Arab world, Gross was the first journalist sympathetic to Israel to be favorably profiled in a Saudi newspaper, at a time when Saudi outreach to Israel was in its infancy.

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.

Education and family

Gross was educated at Wadham College at Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). 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 brother-in-law is the novelist and author John Preston. His uncle was Tony Gross, a pioneering fashion optician. He has a daughter, Sivan.

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 (Terezin) 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".

Gross discussed his upbringing growing up surrounded by cultural and literary luminaries in London and New York, as well as his later career and work with Roma and human rights, in an interview in 2020.

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'', ''Evening Standard'', and other publications; in Israel, for '' Haaretz'', ''Maariv'' and ''The Jerusalem Post''; in Germany for ''Die Welt''; and in Iran, for a number of opposition websites.

In a series titled “Conversations with friends about their lives,” Gross has interviewed pianist Evgeny Kissin, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, filmmaker Hossein Amini, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, writers David Pryce-Jones, John O'Sullivan, Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff and others.

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.

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 critical of the BBC
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