Jan T. Gross

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Jan Tomasz Gross (born December 8, 1947 in Warsaw)- a controversial Jewish-American historian of Polish origin. He is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton University. He grew up in a Jewish family in Poland and attended 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 has taught at Yale, NYU, and Paris, in addition to Princeton.

He is most known 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 were supported, in part at least, by the Institute of National Remembrance. The Institute, however, estimated that the number of victims was about 380, based on its own investigation of the massacre site, compared to the 1,600 victims claimed in Gross' book. Gross based his estimate on the Jewish population of Jedwabne in 1941 and the presumption that almost all were killed in the pogrom. In spite of the contrary results, Gross has not attempted to change the number of victims in any of his later editions of his book. Furthermore investigations have exposed that Jedwabne had not been the only town in which such pogroms took place.[citation needed]

Gross has also written extensively on other aspects of post-War Polish life and totalitarianism. His most notable book is "Fear -Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz", in which he covers the Kielce pogrom and further violence against Jews in post-war Poland.

[edit] 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. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 396. ISBN 0-691-09603-1. 
  • 2006: Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Random House, ISBN 0-375-50924-0.

[edit] External links

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