Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research facility. An expert on the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East, he has written extensively for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is a contributing editor. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, he 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. He has testified before Congress on Middle Eastern affairs and briefed the White House.

As a post-doctorate fellow at The Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace in 1984 to 1987, Dr. Oren completed his thesis on the secret Egypt-Israel peace talks of the early 1950s--later published as The Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War--and contributed to the Palestinian Biographical Dictionary. The latter project involved researching and writing biographical sketches of Palestinian leaders from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, and tracking the evolution of Palestinian policy toward the peace process and Israel.

Dr. Oren is the author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. The book 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, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, was eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

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.