About This Project

Today Dr. Michael Oren is The Deputy Minister for Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Michael Oren was a member of Knesset where he serves on the foreign affairs, defense, and constitutional committees and heads initiatives to improve Israel’s public diplomacy and fight BDS. From 2009 to the end of 2013, he served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He was instrumental in obtaining US defense aid, especially for the Iron Dome system, and American loan guarantees for Israel’s economy. He built bridges with diverse communities across the nation, wrote dozens of op-eds and conducted hundreds of media interviews, strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. He holds four honorary doctorates and his been named Statesman of the Year by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His last three books–Six Days of War, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, and Ally: My Journal  Across the American-Israel Divide–were all New York Times bestsellers. He has won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award, a National Humanities prize, and the Jewish Book Award.

Raised in New Jersey, Michael Oren made aliya in the 1970s, was an emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union and a gold medal-winning athlete in the Maccabiah Games. He served as a Lone Soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, as a paratrooper in the First Lebanon War and, as IDF Spokesman, as an officer in the Second Lebanon War and the Cast Lead campaign in Gaza. He remains active in efforts to assist Lone Soldiers in Israel.

Michael Oren has been named by Politico as one of the fifty most influential thinkers in America, by the Forward as one of the five most influential Jews in America, and by the Jerusalem Post as one of the ten most influential Jews worldwide. He is proudest, though, of Sally, his wife of 33 years, their three children and their first two Israeli grandchildren.