Michael Oren has had an honorable career, growing up in New Jersey, a baseball fan who got his doctorate at Princeton, a distinguished historian, and Israeli ambassador to Washington from 2009 to 2013. His new book Ally is a valuable and sober dissection of the real existing relationship, one that used to be called a “special relationship,” between Israel and the United States, under President Barack Obama. One concludes from the book that the two countries are just friends, but not like before. The book, clearly if not eloquently written, is part autobiography, part history, part commentary on the attitudes of American Jewry, and part an account of Oren’s own political views. But above all, it is a work full of anguish at the tension that has developed between the U.S. while Obama has been president, and Israel. It is not, as some opinionated critics have written, an “imaginary account” of the relationship written for mercenary reasons, as U.S....(Read Full Article)