30 Facts About Tom Gross

Tom Gross is a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East.

Tom Gross appears as a commentator on the BBC in English, BBC Arabic, and various Middle Eastern and other networks.

Long involved in discreet behind-the-scenes bridge-building meetings between officials and activists from Israel and nations throughout the Arab world, Tom 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".

Tom Gross was similarly described in Toronto's National Post in April 2019.

Tom Gross was educated at Wadham College at Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Tom Gross's father, John Gross, was a distinguished author and critic, and his mother, Miriam Gross, and sister, Susanna Gross, are literary editors.

Tom Gross's brother-in-law is the novelist and author John Preston.

Tom Gross's uncle was Tony Gross, a pioneering fashion optician.

Tom Gross has 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.

Tom Gross wrote in The Spectator magazine that Sonia had no children of her own, and "she became almost like a second mother to me".

Tom 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.

Tom Gross was formerly the Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and for the New York Daily News.

Tom Gross 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.

Tom Gross has criticized the UN for not doing more to promote freedom in countries such as North Korea and Mauritania.

Tom Gross has 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.

Tom Gross has advocated for the rights of the Roma, Domari, Kurdish, Yazidi and Rohingya minorities, and disabled people.

Tom Gross has been cited on the subject in papers such as The New York Times and interviewed in Haaretz and on television about this.

Tom Gross has consistently supported the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel.

Tom Gross has written about the Jews of the Arab world, specifically about the forced removal of Jews from Arab countries.

Tom Gross has lived and worked in Prague, where he served as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.

Tom Gross helped launch the Czech edition of Elle magazine, the first international glossy magazine in post-communist central and eastern Europe.

Tom Gross has acted as a consultant to the Prague Jewish museum.

Tom Gross has campaigned on behalf of the Romani people.

Tom Gross criticized the internationally renowned liberal icon and playwright Vaclav Havel, in columns in The Spectator and The Prague Post, for not doing enough to help Roma while he served as Czech president.

Tom Gross has worked on a number of television programs and documentary films, including BBC TV specials on Czech Roma, and on Sudeten Germans.

Tom Gross has been interviewed on international politics on Sky News Arabia, i24 News, Russia Today, TRT World Turkey, Israel Channel 13 and BBC Arabic.

Tom Gross is co-author of Out of Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine and of The Time Out Guide to Prague.

Tom Gross is a voluntary director of the Raif Badawi Foundation named after the imprisoned Saudi liberal dissident, and a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor, of Mideast Dig and of Keren Malki, a charity helping special needs children in Israel.

Tom Gross is a founding signatory to The Henry Jackson Society's Statement of Principles in London.