Gideon Remez

Gideon Remez was born in Tel Aviv on June 2, 1946. He served in the Israel Army Paratroops from 1964 to ’66; on reserve duty, he saw combat on the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War and later in the Jordan Valley, and was a front-line reporter from the Suez Canal theater of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Following a Bachelor’s degree in Hebrew Linguistics and Literature and in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (’73), Remez received a Master’s degree in History of American Civilization  (’78) from Brandeis University, Massachusetts.  After retiring from radio journalism in 2003, he joined the research project initiated by Dr. Isabella Ginor of the Truman Institute at the Hebrew University on the Soviet military involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.  He was formally appointed a research fellow of the Institute as of academic year 2009; since a change in the institute’s terminology in 2014, his title is Associate Fellow, with no change in status.

Remez was for some 36 years a journalist with Kol Israel (Voice of Israel, the national radio network of the Israel Broadcasting Authority), serving as a newswriter, Parliamentary Correspondent, Head of the Current Affairs Department and Executive Editor in the central newsroom. During leaves of absence, he was also Press Relations Manager for Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd. (1970-72) and Staff Correspondent for The Jerusalem Post (1972). He is a regular contributor to broadcast and print media in the United States, Israel, Europe and Australia, and a frequent lecturer in Israel and abroad. In 2003-2005, he taught news broadcasting at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, southern Israel.

From 1982 until his retirement, Remez was Head of Kol Israel's Foreign News Desk. In 1991 he originated, as editor/presenter, The International Hour, the first daily program in the Israeli media devoted entirely to foreign affairs, specializing in interviews with newsmakers worldwide and real-time reporting of breaking news. Remez also produced and anchored widely acclaimed live coverage of such events as the Romanian revolution of 1989, the 1991 and 1993 coup attempts in Moscow, and every American presidential election from 1980 to 2000, when his broadcast’s prediction of a tie in the electoral college was among the closest made anywhere. His world exclusives included the first interview with Andrei Sakharov over the phone installed to inform the Soviet dissident that he could return from internal exile; and (after a long struggle with Israeli censorship) Fidel Castro’s permission for Cuban Jews to emigrate to Israel. On 11 September 2001, he was on air when the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Center and was the first to conclude, within minutes, that this was a "kamikaze attack.”

In recognition of these achievements, Remez received the Nahum Sokolov Award (“Israeli Pulitzer Prize”) for broadcast journalism (1993); the Joint Distribution Committee’s Boris Smolar Award for coverage of Israel-Diaspora relations (1999) and a citation from the B’nai B’rith Wolf Matsdorf Journalism Awards (2000).