Michael Oren

His father had served as an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and participated in the Korean War.

Oren grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, in a Conservative Jewish household.

He attended West Orange Mountain High School.

In his youth, he was an activist in Zionist and Jewish youth groups such as United Synagogue Youth.

A meeting with then–Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, strengthened Oren's decision to move to Israel.

Reading about Rabin sparked Oren's interest in the Israeli ambassadorship to Washington, a post he would eventually attain.

Michael Bornstein Oren (Hebrew: מייקל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein; May 20, 1955) is an American-Israeli diplomat, essayist, historian, novelist, and politician.

Marty Balin, one of the main songwriters of Jefferson Airplane, wrote two songs about her in the 1960s.

Oren's nephew is comedian Jon Rudnitsky.

Oren has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the New York Times best-selling Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, Power, Faith and Fantasy, and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award and the National Jewish Book Award.

Oren has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities in the United States and at Ben-Gurion and Hebrew universities in Israel.

He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

The Forward named Oren one of the five most influential American Jews, and The Jerusalem Post listed him as one of the world's ten most influential Jews.

In 1973, Oren won first prize in the PBS National Young Filmmaker's contest for the film, Comrades in Arms, which he wrote and directed.

In the summer of 1976, he worked as gofer for Orson Welles.

Oren won two gold medals and one silver medal at the 1977 Maccabiah Games in rowing, a sport in which he remains active.

At age 15, he made his first trip to Israel with the youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

In 1977 Oren completed his BA degree in International Relations from Columbia College.

He continued his studies at Columbia, receiving an MA degree in International Affairs in 1978 from the School of International and Public Affairs, where he was an International Fellow and a DACOR Fellow.

After college, he spent a year as an adviser to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations.

In 1979 Oren immigrated to Israel.

Upon assuming Israeli citizenship, he changed his last name from "Bornstein" to "Oren", meaning "pine tree" in Hebrew.

In 1979, Oren began his military service in the Israel Defense Forces.

In 1982 he married Sally Edelstein, who was born in San Francisco and immigrated to Israel in 1981.

They have three children.

In an article published in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg profiled Sally's acquaintance with rock stars Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane.

He served as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War.

His unit was caught in a Syrian ambush on the second day of the war.

His commander was killed and nearly everyone was wounded.

He then joined a unit stationed in Sidon.

A day after his wedding, in the summer of 1982, Oren returned to Beirut.

Following his regular military service, Oren volunteered to work with the Zionist underground in the Soviet Union.

In 1986 he earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton.

Oren was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University and a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel Aviv University.

He is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States (2009–2013), former member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office.

He renounced his American citizenship in 2009 upon his nomination as ambassador to the United States, since Israeli law prohibits international representatives from holding dual nationality.

A few years later Oren returned to the United States to continue his education, studying at Princeton University.

Oren retired as ambassador to the United States in 2013, and was replaced by Ron Dermer.

In the 2015 Israeli election, Oren was elected to the Knesset for the Kulanu party.

Oren was born Michael Scott Bornstein in upstate New York, the son of Marilyn (née Goldstein), a marriage and family therapist, and Lester Milton Bornstein, a hospital director.