Haviv Rettig Gur

Haviv Rettig Gur (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.

Early life
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.

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

Views and opinions
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:

For the Jews, the 21st century is beginning to take shape as the century of confusion. Wikipedia may sum up "Jewish identity" in 333 words, but the reality is a complex and conflicted Jewish world in which identities are diverging in deep and sometimes mutually exclusive ways.

Every study shows that Jews in Israel and America are growing farther apart each year. Israeli youth, taught by an incompetent education system that, besides its financial and structural woes, is utterly unaware of the Diaspora's existence, know nothing about the Jewish communities of the world, and little about their own place in Jewish history. Across the Atlantic, the identity of American Jewish youth, in the words of Yeshiva University's Rabbi Jacob Schachter, is shifting away from being "Jews influenced by America," toward "the knowledge that they are America."

There are some clear definitions out there for Jewish affiliation, but no hard and fast rules about Jewish identity. The internal Israeli religious-secular culture war has created a spectrum of Jewish identification centered on how and why one ignores Israel's official chief rabbinate - the haredim in favor of their own "Torah masters" and, increasingly, the secular in favor of pop-Buddhism and unrecognized marriages. It is, if you will, a spectrum of identities centered on the question of institutional and political affiliation, not spiritual choice.

Meanwhile, American Jews are the quintessential Jews of choice, living in an America founded on the principle of individualistic spirituality. Many don't even accept that there can be objective criteria for Jewish identity.

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.