Oren was born Michael Bornstein in upstate New York. His father was an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Korean War. Oren grew up in New Jersey in a Conservative Jewish household. As the only Jewish boy in a Catholic neighborhood, he says he experienced anti-Semitism on a daily basis. In his youth, he was an activist in Zionist youth groups such as USY and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabiah Games. At 15, Oren made his first trip to Israel with youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

In 1977, Oren completed his undergraduate degree from Columbia University. He continued his studies at Columbia, receiving a Masters in International Affairs in 1978 from the School of International and Public Affairs. After college, he spent a year as an adviser to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations headed by Yehuda Blum. In 1979, Oren emigrated to Israel. A few years later, Oren returned to the United States to continue his education, studying at Princeton University. In 1986, he earned a Ph.D. in Near East Studies.

In 1979, Oren joined the Israel Defense Forces. He served as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War. His unit was caught in a Syrian ambush on the second day of the war. His commander was killed and nearly everyone was wounded. He then joined a unit stationed in Sidon. Oren married in the summer of 1982 and returned the next day to Beirut.During the 1991 Gulf War he was Israeli liaison officer to the U.S. Sixth Fleet. He served as an army spokesman in the IDF Reserves during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. During the 2008—2009 Israel—Gaza conflict, he was a media relations officer. Oren is the first cousin of Amos Goren, a veteran Israeli commando who played a major role in the famous IDF hostage rescue operation at Entebbe.

In 2006, Oren was a visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale University. He continued teaching at Yale in 2007. Beginning in 2008, he became a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service for the 2008-2009 academic year as part of the faculty associated with the Program for Jewish Civilization.

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.

On May 3, 2009, Oren was appointed as Ambassador of Israel to the United States by Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, succeeding Sallai Meridor. He then forfeited his United States' citizenship in order to accept the post.

Ambassador Oren strongly condemned 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."

In October 2009, Oren declined an invitation to attend a conference hosted by J Street, a left-leaning Israel advocacy group, which has been critical of the Israel government's foreign policy and relations with the Palestinians. He continued his criticism after the conference, calling J Street "a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It’s significantly out of the mainstream." However, the two have since come to a more congenial understanding, with Oren stating that "J Street has now come and supported Congressman [Howard] Berman's Iran sanction bill; it has condemned the Goldstone report; it has denounced the British court’s decision to try Tzipi Livni for war crimes, which puts J Street much more into the mainstream."

On February 8, 2010, Micheal Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, spoke at the University of California Irvine. During his speech Oren was interrupted by 11 protesters who shouted, "Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech," and "How many Palestinians did you kill?" The outburst and subsequent arrest of the protesters sparked controversy over whether or not the protesters were exercising free speech as they claimed they were, or whether it was a breach of etiquette.

Following the Gaza flotilla raid in May 2010, Oren wrote an op-ed in The New York Times entitled "An Assault, Cloaked in Peace". In the editorial, he accused the organizers of the flotilla of attempting to "create a provocation" in order to "put international pressure on Israel to drop the Gaza embargo". He further made the claim that the Mavi Marmara was "a vessel too large to be neutralized by technical means".

Political commentary

Oren has written many articles commenting on current political issues. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic.

Middle East history

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. Power, Faith and Fantasy earned positive reviews from Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Willamette Week.

Oren's Six Days of War is an historical account of the events of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The book was widely praised by critics and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. It spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The New York Times Book Review wrote positively of Six Days of War, as did the Washington Post which calls it "not only the best book so far written on the Six Day War, it is likely to remain the best."

Fiction

Oren has also ventured into fiction. His book Reunion was published in 2004. According to Publishers Weekly, it tells of how "[f]ive decades after an unforgettable winter at Saint-Vith in Belgium's Ardennes Forest, the surviving members of the 133rd Infantry Battalion receive invitations out of the blue to an on-site reunion. None of the men, despite age and its array of related obstacles, believes that it's an offer he can refuse. And in every case, the invitation opens a Pandora's box of guilty memories and recriminations. Oren captures the rhythms of these melancholy reveries with nicely observed portraits of lives nearing completion."