==Biography==

Born in New Jersey, U.S., Michael Oren received B.A. (1977) and M.I.A. (School of International Affairs, 1978) at Columbia University and M.A. and Ph.D. (History of the Middle East) at Princeton University. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Yale University before coming to Georgetown University as a Visiting Professor in Fall 2008.

Oren immigrated to Israel in 1979 and served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, seeing combat in the 1982 Lebanon War. He was an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin and served as the Israeli liaison officer to the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War. He served as a Major in the IDF Reserve during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Oren has also ventured into fiction. His book Reunion was published in 2004. According to Publishers Weekly, it is about, "Five decades after an unforgettable winter at Saint-Vith in Belgium's Ardennes Forest, the surviving members of the 133rd Infantry Battalion receive invitations out of the blue to an on-site reunion. None of the men, despite age and its array of related obstacles, believes that it's an offer he can refuse. And in every case, the invitation opens a Pandora's box of guilty memories and recriminations. Oren captures the rhythms of these melancholy reveries with nicely observed portraits of lives nearing completion." [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452285143/]

His book, Category: Power, Faith and Fantasy: The United States in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present - , a history of American involvement in the Middle East, is published by Norton and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Power, Faith and Fantasy earned positive reviews from Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Willamette Week. [http://mobile.newsweek.com/detail.jsp?key=6752&rc=top&p=1&pv=1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011802096.html] [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Rodenbeck.t.html?ex=1172552400&en=70bcf044212f709d&ei=5070] [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/28/RVGLUNL9131.DTL][http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3314/8560/]