[9][10] His father had served as an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and participated in the Korean War.

[16] At age 15, he made his first trip to Israel with the youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

[11] In 1973, Oren won first prize in the PBS National Young Filmmaker's contest for the film, Comrades in Arms, which he wrote and directed.

He renounced his American citizenship in 2009 upon his nomination as ambassador to the United States, since Israeli law prohibits international representatives from holding dual nationality.

[1] A few years later, Oren returned to the United States to continue his education, receiving both his MA in 1984 and PhD in 1986 in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

[22][23] In an article published in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg profiled Sally's acquaintance with rock stars Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane.

Beginning in 2008, he became a visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service for the 2008–09 academic year as part of the faculty associated with the Program for Jewish Civilization.

[32][33] President George W. Bush appointed Oren to serve on the honorary delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel in May 2008.

[34] While working at a think-tank in Jerusalem, Oren publicly opposed the 2003 Iraq war, believing at the time that America "should not get involved in state-building in a region where states are only held together by savage central power.

[40] On May 3, 2009, Oren was appointed as ambassador of Israel to the United States by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, succeeding Sallai Meridor.

[41] Oren strongly criticized the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict report, which determined Israel was guilty of possible war crimes.

In an October 2009 op-ed in The New Republic, he stated, "The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves.

"[45] Oren has initiated Israel outreach events for Irish Americans,[46] Latino[47] and LGBT leadership, and the Chinese embassy.

[53] According to several midshipmen, the pre-visit instructions were along the lines of, “It is not appropriate, in a setting like this, to bring up any major points of contention during conversation, current or historical.

[60] In 2011, he received the Outstanding Achievers with Learning Disabilities Award from the Lab School of Washington, D.C.[61] He delivered the keynote address at 2012 Equality Forum on LGBT rights in Israel.

As ambassador, he has published nearly sixty op-eds[70] and has given dozens of television interviews, including Bill Maher, Colbert Report, The View, and The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

In July 2014 Oren argued against a ceasefire and for the continuation of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, calling on the international community to leave Israel alone to defang and deprive Hamas of its heavy arms and make it pay a "prohibitive cost.

"[75] On June 15, 2015, Oren gave a speech at the Leonardo Hotel in Jerusalem, in which he said that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement poses a "strategic threat" to Israel, which needs to fight it "like a war, which it is".

[77] Shortly afterwards another article by Oren was published by Foreign Policy, which argued that Obama's outreach to the Muslim world was partly rooted in "abandonment" by his father and stepfather.

[80] In 2015, Oren published Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (June 2015), a New York Times bestseller which aimed to describe the recent state of Israel–US relations.

[81] The book has received both praise and criticism,[82] including a negative review by Philip H. Gordon titled "Bibi's man in D.C., still spinning for the boss"[83] and a positive review by Bret Stephens for The Wall Street Journal which called the book "the smartest and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I've read in years.

"[85] Noah Efron wrote in Haaretz that the book continued the self-professed "armchair psychoanalyzing" of the U.S. president and chided Oren for failing to assign any responsibility to Israeli for the decline in US-Israel relations.

[86] Power, Faith and Fantasy, a history of American involvement in the Middle East, was published by Norton and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.

Oren has written works of fiction for which he has been called a “disturbingly good writer” by Hadassah Magazine[95] and “a master of the short story” by The Jerusalem Post.

[97] His latest novel, Swann’s War, was described by Kirkus Reviews as “intriguing, wonderfully delineated, and tension-filled,” and awarded a star rating.

[103] The Yom HaAliyah bill was co-sponsored by Knesset members from different parties in a rare instance of cooperation across the political spectrum.