What Makes Us Brave? Cultivating Courage on the Page and in the Arena

A special NLI USA event marking December 7th, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, featuring Ambassador Michael Oren with Laura Blumenfeld. Ambassador Oren is a historian, statesman, and gifted writer, most recently of the WWII novel, “Swann’s War.” In conversation with the New York Times best-selling author and former U.S. diplomat Laura Blumenfeld, Oren will explore the amazing grace and occasional failure of Jewish courage from the ancient Bible to the modern battlefield.

Michael Oren served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, as a Member of Knesset, and as Deputy Minister of Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. Among his many honors, Oren is a New York Times best-selling author. He was named by Politico as one of the fifty most influential thinkers in America, by the Forward as one of the five most influential Jews in America, and by the Jerusalem Post as one of the ten most influential Jews worldwide. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, he has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Laura Blumenfeld is a Middle East analyst, a New York Times best-selling author and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. She previously served as a senior policy advisor on the State Department’s Israeli-Palestinian Negotiating Team. Blumenfeld was an award-winning reporter for The Washington Post for twenty years. She has written for The New Yorker, NYT Magazine,The Financial Times, and has appeared on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, BBC. She is the author of Revenge: A Story of Hope.