MIDDLEBURY — Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren will be at Middlebury College on Monday, Feb. 24, to give the talk “Ultimate Allies: America and Israel, 1620 to the Present.” The event, which takes place at 7 p.m., at Dana Auditorium, 356 College St., is presented as part of the college’s Alexander Hamilton Forum 
For nearly five years, Oren served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was instrumental in obtaining U.S. defense aid, especially for the Iron Dome system, and American loan guarantees for Israel’s economy. He built bridges with diverse communities across the nation, wrote dozens of op-eds and conducted hundreds of media interviews, fortifying the U.S.- Israel alliance. 
More recently, as a Member of the Israel’s Knesset and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, he continued to interact with foreign leaders and to defend Israel in the media. 
A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Oren has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. His last three books — “Six Days of War;” “Power, Faith, and Fantasy;” and “Ally: My Journal Across the American-Israel Divide” — were all New York Times bestsellers. He received the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award, a National Humanities prize, and the Jewish Book Award. 
The talk is free and open to the public.