Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is pleased to announce that members of our SPME Network are exclusively invited to sign up for a Special Conference Call Academic Briefing on January 19, 2009 at 3:oo PM Eastern Time, with Prof. Michael Oren, currently serving in the IDF in Gaza.

Participation for the conference call will be limited to the first 125 of our SPME Network members who RSVP by emailing your name and home institution or town directly to Dr. Ed Beck at ScholarsforPeace@aol.com and asking for a spot on the conference call by January 19, 2009 at 12:o0 PM Eastern Time and are contributing network subscribers during the current academic year from July 1, 2008 through Present. Participants selected will be returned email with conference call call-in instructions. Participation will be on a first come, first served, space available basis to those who RSVP in time.

Michael Oren

There is still time to contribute to reserve a place. To contribute, click here . To see if your contributions are current for this academic year click here to check the SPME Honor Roll of Donors. If you don't see your name and thing you are current click here to make an inquiry.

Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research facility, where he specializes in the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East. He is the author of the New York Time's Best Seller List and both academically and critically acclaimed book Power, Faith, and Fantasy:America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (Norton 2007)

He has written extensively for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is a contributing editor, and has been interviewed on CNN, Fox, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show, and Today. He is the CBS Middle East expert.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren 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, returning to Yale in 2007. He has testified before Congress on Middle Eastern affairs and briefed the White House.

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 and won a Council for the Humanities Book Award.

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.

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