Haviv Rettig Gur

From 2010 to 2012, Rettig Gur 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.

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.

In March, 2009, Gur was contacted by a man claiming to be "David Weiss, captain in the Norwegian military". Weiss was quoted in a news story written by Gur in which Norwegian Jews said they experienced tensions related to their Jewishness, mostly from Muslim immigrants and anti-Israel discourse in the media.

The next day, on April 5, 2009, the rival daily Dagbladet confirmed that "David Weiss" was the faked identity of a 45-year-old Oslo resident who had never served in the military. According to Dagbladet, he had fooled The Jerusalem Post, the BBC and several major Norwegian papers.

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."

Haviv Rettig (later Rettig Gur) was born 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.

Haviv Rettig Gur (Hebrew: חביב רטיג גור ‎) (b. April 4, 1981) is an Israeli journalist who serves as the political correspondent and analyst for The Times of Israel.

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.