Haviv Rettig

Who is Haviv Rettig?

Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israeli journalist who serves as the political correspondent and analyst for The Times of Israel.

From 2010 to 2012, he served as the Director of Communications for the Jewish Agency. Before that, he was the Jewish world correspondent for the Israeli English-language daily The Jerusalem Post between June 2005 and July 2010. He changed his last name from Rettig to Gur after getting married in March 2008.

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 Post's chief correspondent to the [annual Israeli security-related] Herzliya Conference."

Gur was born on April 4, 1981, in Jerusalem to American-born parents. He lived in the United States from 1989 to 1999, returning to Israel in 1999 to serve in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic. Upon completing military service, Gur studied history and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Gur's reporting focused on trends in Jewish identity, especially in the United States and Israel. 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.