Ranan Lurie

Ranan Lurie's father was born in 1906, in the new neighborhood of "Yemin Moshe".

The grandfather Isaiah, petrified by the thought that he would be recruited into the Turkish army during the First World War, utilized his French citizenship and fled to Egypt where he became the president of the Ashkenazi Jewish community.

Lurie was a member of the Israeli underground armed organization ("Irgun") and was wounded in a battle against the British.

He later served in the IDF reserves as a Major and company commander.

Ranan R. Lurie (רענן לוריא; May 26, 1932 – June 8, 2022) was an Israeli-American political cartoonist and journalist, a senior associate at the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) since 1990, a member of the United Nations Correspondents Association, and founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cartoonews, a current events educational magazine.

Ranan Lurie was born on May 26, 1932, the son of Shoshana (Shmuelewitz) and Joseph Lurie, who had traveled from Tel Aviv to Port Said, Egypt, at the invitation of Joseph's father (Rabbi Isaiah Lurie) to give birth to their first child at his home.

In July 1954, when Israel and Egypt were still in an official stage of war, Lurie visited the flagship of an Egyptian navy flotilla anchoring in Venice, pretending to be an Australian journalist, he interviewed the frigate's high ranking enemy officers and took photographs of their newly installed Soviet Radar.

Lurie described this as an infiltration and won an Israeli journalistic award "For Unprecedented bravery".

About a week before the Six-Day War began, Lurie had his fine-art exhibit in Montreal.

He was recruited in the midst of his show to his reserve duty as a Senior Company Commander, a Major in the Fifth Brigade (Giv'aty) that was commanded by Colonel Ze'ev Shaham.

Lurie's first mission was to protect Israel's "bottleneck" (the narrowest stretch of land between the sea and Jordanian Tulkarm) his original unit swelled to five hundred warriors (which now included tanks, anti-tank guns mounted on jeeps, a battery of Howitzer guns, a reserve company of Technion students as well as a company of army engineers.) After 36 hours of suffering heavy shelling he switched his force to attack-mode and conquered Tulkarm from the North.

Then he received a direct order from General Uzi Narkiss, commander of The Central Command "To storm as far as possible in the direction of Nablus with the intent of reaching the Ramin Junction within ninety minutes - and make a bold sweep that will hopefully expose the Egyptian/Iraqi commandos that were trying to introduce toxic gas to the front lines."

In this mission, Lurie confronted the Egyptian commandos and the Arab Legion.

He and his now tiny force pin-pointed the placing of the gas-equipped Egyptian commandos, and after eliminating them through fierce face-to-face battle, discovered the dreading skull & bones gas symbols on the cans available already for action.

His escapades then were reported by the international media and lectured at West Point.

At the end of the war he gained a different kind of world attention when he refused to deport the Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Anabta to Jordan, risking a court martial which would have involved Prime Minister Levi Eshkol Lurie's friend.

After meeting with Ranan the prime minister's friend Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was instructed "to return immediately all the exiled Palestinian inhabitants and rebuild any of their destroyed homes".

Defense Minister Dayan followed the order.

Lurie was the political cartoonist for Yediot Aharonot of Israel (1957–1967) after which he was invited to become a political cartoonist and cover artist for LIFE magazine (1968–1972).

In 1964, the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol unveiled Lurie's one-man show of oil portraits at the "Sokolov House" in Tel Aviv, in the presence of Joseph Zaritsky, Reuven Rubin and Meiron Sima.

On May 23, 1967, the President of Israel, Zalman Shazar, unveiled Lurie's one-man show of oil portraits at "Expo 67" in Montreal, Canada.

After LIFE magazine folded in late December 1972, he was invited to publish his cartoons in Newsweek.

A short time after, he was offered a full page in Newsweek International (1973–1977), and later served as the Senior Analyst and political cartoonist for The U.S. News & World Report in Washington, D.C.

He is probably the only artist who has been invited simultaneously by both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to hold a one-man show at the U.S. Senate (October 23, 1973).

Senator Abraham Ribicoff unveiled Lurie's exhibition on behalf of the Democratic Party, followed by Senator Lowell Weicker, who unveiled it on behalf of the Republican Party.

Vice President Gerald Ford presided over the event.

The exhibit took place at the Senate Caucus Room on Capitol Hill "In Honor of Ranan Lurie" and it was sponsored by the New York Times publishing house.

Lurie interviewed, painted, and drew more than 250 world leaders.

His drawings often include a small trademark smiling sun, sometimes drawn on the subject's necktie or other articles of clothing.

(This event gave him an advantage when he met with President Sadat (1977 and 1979) as well as with President Mubarak (1984 and 1997) for interviews and portrait-sittings).

Two weeks after his birth Ranan and his parents returned to Tel Aviv.

His father was sixth-generation Jerusalem-born and his mother seventh-generation.