| Haviv Rettig Gur | |
| Native Name Lang: | he |
| Birth Date: | 4 April 1981 |
| Birth Place: | Jerusalem, Israel |
| Citizenship: | Israeli |
| Alma Mater: | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Occupation: | Journalist |
| Employer: | The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Agency for Israel |
| Spouse: | Rachel Gur |
Haviv Rettig Gur (Hebrew: חביב רטיג גור) (b. April 4, 1981) is an Israeli journalist who serves as the political correspondent and senior analyst for The Times of Israel.[1]
Haviv Rettig (later Rettig Gur) was born in Jerusalem. His parents were American-Jewish immigrants to Israel. He lived in the United States from 1989 to 1999, returning to Israel in 1999 to serve in the Nahal Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic. Rettig Gur graduated from Tel Aviv University in 2010.[2]
From 2005 to 2010, Rettig Gur was a journalist at The Jerusalem Post, where he covered stories related to the Jewish world. In June 2010, Rettig Gur was nominated to be the spokesman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the agency's first native English speaker to be spokesman in over 50 years.
According to the website of the Limmud Conference, where he was a speaker in December 2007, Gur covered "organised Jewish communities worldwide on issues including demographics, identity, anti-Semitism, education and communal politics... He dealt with Israel's contentious education budget and Israel-NATO relations. He was the Posts chief correspondent to the [annual Israeli security-related] Herzliya Conference."
He opines regularly on what he sees as the growing divide between Israeli Jewish identity and American Jewish identity. Together, these two communities constitute some 80% of world Jewry, he writes, and their basic identities as Jews are increasingly being constructed in radically different ways.
He writes:
In August 2009, the Jewish Agency's Masa project produced an advertisement that claimed that one-half of Diaspora Jews are assimilating and becoming "lost to us." This drew a firestorm of criticism from overseas, and led Gur to comment that the disagreement reflected this different way of constructing Jewish identity.[3]