(JERUSALEM, May 4, 2009, 10 Iyar 5769) – Michael Oren, Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and noted historian and author, has been officially chosen as Israel’s ambassador to the United States of America. He has been formally offered the post and confirmation is expected from various Israeli government forums in the coming days.  

An authority on the military and diplomatic history of the Middle East, Oren, 54, will assume the position of Ambassador in the coming weeks. A long-time Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, he is also a visiting professor in the Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

“Since Michael Oren joined the Shalem Center eleven years ago he’s shown himself to be consistently original and compelling scholar. His work has transformed debate within academia on crucial subjects of Middle Eastern and Israeli history. Through lectures, books and media appearances he’s succeeded in reaching broad constituencies and we expect his success to continue in his new and challenging role.” said Daniel Polisar, President of the Shalem Center.

Commenting about his appointment, Dr. Oren said, “I am deeply honored to assume the post of Ambassador to the United States. I am grateful to all my colleagues at the Shalem Center, a place justly known for its excellence in research, scholarly and creative activity; for the breadth and depth of quality among its institutes, for its commitment to education, to Zionism; and for its belief in the value of leadership and public service.”

During the course of his eleven years at the Shalem Center, Michael Oren has, in addition to his own research projects, headed the student education programs, co-directed the summer intern programs and been involved in shaping the curriculum for the planned Shalem College, on whose faculty he intends to serve.

He joined the Shalem Center as the first fellow when the Senior Fellows program began in 1998, undertaking to write—with the assistance of a research team assembled under Shalem auspices—the definitive history of the Six Day War based on archival sources from Israel, the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union and the Arab world.

The resulting book, Six Days of War: the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2002) was a New York Times bestseller and won the Los Angeles Times’ History Book of the Year prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His most recent book, again the result of his work with the research team at Shalem Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, (Norton, 2007) was on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks and won a Council for the Humanities Book Award.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. He was a Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University and a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, returning to Yale in 2007. He has testified before Congress on Middle Eastern affairs and briefed the White House.

He has written extensively for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is a contributing editor, and has been interviewed on CNN, Fox, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show, and Today.

Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Michael Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the first Lebanon War, and as a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an army spokesman in the second Lebanon War. He acted as a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, and as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations. He was the director of Inter-Religious Affairs in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. Michael Oren lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.

About the Shalem Center

The Shalem Center was established in Jerusalem in 1994 with the goal of developing the ideas needed to guide and sustain the Jewish people in the decades to come. Founded by scholars and public figures from Israel and the Diaspora, the Center advances original research, publication, and teaching in the areas most crucial to the public life of the Jewish people, including Jewish moral and political thought, Zionist history and ideas, Biblical archaeology, democratic theory, and economic and social policy.

Natan Sharansky, Michael Oren, Yossi Klein Halevi, Yoram Hazony, Daniel Gordis, Daniel Polisar, and Meirav Jones are just some of the leading thinkers researching in our institutes, writing best-selling books, teaching hundreds of students and addressing thousands at conferences. We have built an intellectual community dedicated to exploring the most important questions facing the Jewish people, the state of Israel and the world beyond.

The Shalem Center’s most ambitious current project is the establishment of Israel’s first liberal arts college, which will be open to outstanding students from Israel and from abroad, and will feature innovative programs in its core curriculum along with options for majors in philosophy and Middle East studies.