Beyond politics, book tells Oren’s personal story

Seemingly lost in all the debate over U.S.-Israel relations is that Member of Knesset Michael Oren’s new book, “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” is a memoir—and the memoir covers more than the author’s four years as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 2009-13.

“Very few people have actually read the book and seen what’s in the book, and the book is an American Jewish Zionist story,” Oren said in a phone interview with JNS.org. “It’s about a young man who grows up in the post-Holocaust generation, whose father landed on Normandy and fought all throughout World War II. It’s a total American story. I grew up in this working class neighborhood, and I was the only Jewish kid, and I experienced a lot of anti-Semitism as a kid.”

During his childhood, Oren—born in upstate New York and raised in New Jersey—overcame learning disabilities and the need to wear a leg brace due to physical limitations. 

“I had a lot of challenges,” said Oren. “So the thought that I would somehow get through this and fulfill my dreams—I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to move to Israel, I wanted to be a soldier—is a big part of the story, before I get to Washington.”

“I talk about my relationship with Jewish history, with G-d. I talk about my faith. And that’s well even before we get to the period where I become ambassador,” he said.

Yet much media coverage and some American Jewish communal reactions have focused not necessarily on the book, but instead on recent essays Oren wrote for the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy magazine around the time of his memoir’s release. For the Journal, Oren wrote that Obama abandoned “two core principles of Israel’s alliance with America”—that there must be both “no daylight” and “no surprises” between the allies. For Foreign Policy, Oren wrote that Obama’s ambition to harmonize relations between America and the Islamic world might partly be the result of his personal interactions with Muslims while he was growing up.