A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University, Ambassador Michael Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Ambassador Oren has written extensively for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. His two most recent books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and The Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, were both New York Times bestsellers and won the Los Angeles Times’ History Book of the Year prize, a National Council of the Humanities Award, and the National Jewish Book Award.

Ambassador Oren moved to Israel in the 1970’s where he served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, as a paratrooper in the Lebanon War, a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an IDF spokesman during the Second Lebanon War and the Gaza operation in January 2009. He acted as an Israeli Emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as an adviser to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations, and as the government’s director of Inter-Religious Affairs.