FEATURED JOBS
I almost fell off my chair last week when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Dr. Michael Oren was his pick to be the next ambassador to the United States. I’m honored to know the guy a little bit.
I had last spoken with Michael in the fall when then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was finally, formally bowing out – a process that took six more months to be effective. A few years earlier Michael, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, had stopped by our office. He was promoting his then best-selling book “Power, Faith and Fantasy: American In The Middle East, 1776 to Present.”
I also had read his other best-selling book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Since then we had spoken a few times and I had run his essays at http://www.jewishtimes.com .
Both of his books are fantastic scholarly works that are accessible to the general reader. Most of all, I found Michael engaging and enjoyable. I also saw in him a rare remnant of the ethos of those who crafted the Jewish state in its early years – an immigrant (this time from New Jersey) who passionately believed in both Jewish peoplehood and an independent state. More so, he was one of the few – unlike me –so moved that he went to Israel, stayed, became a paratrooper, and then a bonafide intellectual.
Michael is no slouch, for sure. He has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, from the British and Canadian governments, and from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, returning to Yale in 2007. For the past few years, he’s been a become a senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, which has quickly become a growing and influential think tank.
Now he moves into the political arena, where he has no formal experience. That actually does not worry me. The Michael Oren I know understands how to talk to diverse groups; if you can make it these days on college campuses with your unabashed pro-Israel agenda you have good training. And along the way, he’s had more than a few ties with leading politicians and policy makers around the world.
So the choice is truly out-of-the-box for a Prime Minister who fumbled a great deal last time in the post. In particular, Bibi first rankled the Clinton administration with his peace process policies – giving credence to style being as important as substance—and then alienated American Jewry’s non-Orthodox communities during the “conversion crisis” of 1997-98.
Now Michael –an independent thinker who calls both for attacking Iran and withdrawing from large chunks of the West Bank – will give Bibi advice from Washington. That’s very, very good. What Netanyahu does with such words of wisdom remains to be seen.
Yet with the appointment of Michael Oren in Washington, and Natan Sharansky at the Jewish Agency for Israel, I find myself in a very different position than in the late 1990s vis-a-vie Binyamin Netanyahu. That’s because, so far, I both publicly and privately like what I’m seeing and hearing.
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