October 5, 2009

Israeli ambassador Michael Oren to speak at Homewood

Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, will speak at the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus on Wednesday, Oct. 7. The talk is scheduled for 2 p.m. in Mason Hall Auditorium. The ambassador will be introduced by Lloyd Minor, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

Oren, a noted international historian, was raised in New Jersey and moved to Israel in 1979 after receiving his undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in international studies from Columbia. He later returned to the United States to complete a doctorate in Near East studies at Princeton. He has held fellowships from the U.S. departments of State and Defense and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown.

A prolific author, the ambassador has written extensively for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. His two most recent books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, were both New York Times bestsellers.