Jean-François Steiner

A journalist, novelist, and academic, Jean-François Steiner was born in Paris. His father, the Zionist journalist and activist Isaac Kadmi Cohen, died in Auschwitz; Steiner took the last name of his stepfather. Steiner is best known for the “nonfiction novel” Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp, a first-person account (ghostwritten by Gilles Perrault) of the 1943 uprising in the death camp, which sparked controversy and outrage by taking the stance that Jewish inmates had been complicit in their own deaths and in its presentation of a fictionalized account as if it were documentary history. Steiner again courted controversy during the 1980s by defending Maurice Papon, a government minister accused and later convicted of supervising the deportation of French Jews as a Vichy police official. Steiner’s academic research focuses on quantitative approaches to semiotics.