Jan T. Gross

Jan Tomasz Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton University. He grew up in a Jewish familiy in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he emigrated to the United States in 1969 after being imprisoned during the March 1968 events. He later earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University, and he has taught at Yale, NYU, and Paris, in addition to Princeton.

He is most famous for his work on the Jedwabne massacre, Neighbors (2001), which argued that the massacre was conducted by Poles and not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed. The results were the subject of vigorous debate in Poland, and later have been supported, in part, by Institute of National Remembrance. However, the Institute estimated that the number of victims was about 380, based on its own investigation of the massacre site. This number was considered to be the lower bound for the number of victims, and it is lower than the 1,600 victims claimed in Gross' book, which he obtained from his estimates for the Jewish population of Jedwabne in 1941 and assuming that almost all were killed in the pogrom. In spite of those contrary results from those he extrapolated from an existing population figure,Gross has not changed the number of victims in the further editions of his book. Further investigations exposed that Jedwabne had not been the only town in which such pogroms took place.

Gross has also written extensively on other aspects of post-War Polish life, most notably "Fear - Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz" in which he covers the Kielce pogrom and further violence against Jews in post-war Poland. Gross' views, however, are considered be many, despite his research, to be tainted by his apparent anti-Polish slant.

se also : Holocaust industry

Books

• 2001: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-14-200240-2.
• Jan Tomasz Gross (2003). Revolution from Abroad. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 396. ISBN 0-691-09603-1. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• 2006: Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Random House, ISBN 0-375-50924-0.

External links

• Profile at Princeton
• Poland's willing executioners Neighbors Guardian book review
• Goldhagen for Beginners: A Comment on Jan T. Gross's Neighbors Norman Finkelstein comment on Neighbors