Haviv Rettig Gur

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 Hebrew 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 2007, Rettig Gur covered "organised Jewish communities worldwide on issues including demographics, identity, antisemitism, 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==

Rettig Gur comments regularly on what he sees as the growing divide between Israeli Jewish and American Jewish identity. These two communities constitute 80% of world Jewry, he notes, and their basic identities as Jews are increasingly constructed in radically different ways. In 2009, the Jewish Agency's Masa project produced an advertisement that claimed that half of Diaspora Jews are assimilating and becoming "lost to us". This drew criticism from overseas, and led Rettig Gur to comment that the disagreement reflected this difference in ways of constructing Jewish identity. ==See also==