Dan Grossman’s first day on the air as Denver 7’s morning news anchor was Monday, May 26, 2025.
The next Sunday, June 1, as the Boulder Run for Their Lives group was peacefully demonstrating for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, it was attacked with Molotov cocktails, resulting in the death of one woman and injuries to many other people.
Four days later on June 4, Grossman, this brand-new face on Denver 7’s anchor desk, felt compelled to express his fears about anti-Semitism in an on-air commentary — two minutes and 20 seconds that made waves across the Jewish world and beyond.
Reaction from around the globe — including places like Canada and New Zealand — demonstrates the meaning of “going viral.”
The clip caught the attention of actress Mayim Bialik who took to Facebook and said, “To news anchor Dan Grossman in Denver, CO: I have never met you but hi. You are a hero for our people and you articulated so beautifully what is happening and what framing people don’t seem to understand. Thank you. Also, now I don’t have to say it because you just did.”
Bialik’s post garnered 1,300 comments, 5,100 shares, 21,000 likes and 605,600 plays of the video of Grossman’s commentary, which can be viewed on Denver 7.
Grossman reflects:
“I just went to my news director and said, ‘This is something I’d like to talk about.’ I wasn’t expecting it to be anything other that just a really short clip that aired on the newscast to hopefully shed a bit more light on the experience of Jews in America and how that’s changed, especially since Oct. 7.
“They were kind enough to put their trust in me, especially since I was newer to their airwaves.
“I didn’t anticipate it blowing up like it did. It was kind of crazy to see, to be completely honest with you. The most striking thing to me was that 95% of the hundreds of messages that I got were not just positive, but overwhelmingly positive.
“As a journalist, it can be easy to become a bit cynical about the world, so it was a really nice reminder that there aren’t as many bad people outthere as we sometimes think.”
Grossman’s journey to become a journalist started when he was a junior in high school. He was asked the proverbial, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
“I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I knew my dad, who had been a newspaper reporter, was really passionate when he would tell me about his journalism days. I love sports. So I was like, ‘How do I marry those two things together? Why not try to be a sports reporter?’”
Grossman, who grew up along the beaches in Southern New Jersey, outside of Philadephia, went to Syracuse University because of its well-known journalism school.
“On my first of class, I remember kids in my sports journalism class were debating who should have been the National League batting champ in 1952, and I thought, ‘I know a lot about sports, but these kids are way out of my league.’
“I quickly realized I might be better off exploring something else.”
This realization led to Grossman’s career in broadcast news with his first job in Virginia, followed by a two-year stint in Arkansas. In 2016, he moved to Denver to work at 9News, and “absolutely fell in love with Colorado.”
After a two-year hiatus with a news station in Miami, Grossman returned to Denver as a national correspondent for Scripps, Denver 7’s parent company, and in April of this year joined the Channel 7 news team as a morning anchor, a job that requires him to wake up at 2:30 a.m.
“I think my body only started getting used it two months ago. I sorely underestimated how difficult it was going to be, waking up at 2:30 each morning.”
Grossman, 34, is live on the air weekday mornings, 4:30-9 a.m., after which “three to five days a week I’m going out into the community and talking with experts, folks in the community about issues that affect them.
“We’re still getting out there and talking with people and hearing their concerns face-to-face, which I don’t think any amount of phone calls or Zoom interviews can replace.”
As evidenced by Grossman’s heartfelt editorial heard around the world, Judaism is an important part of his identity.
His father is Jewish. His mother was Christian when he was born.
“Both of their respective families did not approve of their marriage, but over time, both families absolutely adored each other.”
When his parents married, his father made it clear that it was important to him that his children would be raised Jewish.
“My mom loved him so much that she agreed to that, and she fell in love with Judaism.
“My dad did not force her to convert to Judaism; my mom just really identified with the religion. When I was 12, she converted. I thought that was really, really cool.”
Grossman’s father was the president of the Reform temple he attended growing up.
“Every single Friday night, I’d have friends call me asking to hang out, but I was at temple every week.” He had Shabbat dinner weekly with his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
He had never dated Jewish girls, but when Oct. 7 happened, something inside Grossman changed.
“It suddenly became very important to me to date someone Jewish. My current girlfriend is also an East Coast Jew, also living out here.”
Grossman elaborates on why Judaism is important to him:
“My grandmother — we called her Bubby — founded the Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University in South Jersey. The whole idea was to gather stories from Holocaust survivors and archive them in a library so later generations could hear them first-hand after these survivors had died.
“It’s a huge point of pride for my family. Our Bubby loved being Jewish and she cared so much about what Judaism meant to her that she actively went out into the community and did things to make sure that everyone knew what being Jewish was about and why it was so important.”
Today, Bubby’s grandson Dan Grossman is doing the same.
In his courageous, from-the-gut commentary on anti-Semitism, he referenced his beloved late grandmother who warned others of the anti-Semitism that was always bubbling beneath the surface. At the time, Bubby’s family thought she was overreacting, “out of touch,” as Grossman put it.
“If she were alive today, I’d tell my dear bubby, we were out of touch.”
© IJN 2025