Kenneth S. Stern

Kenneth S. Stern is an American
attorney and an author. He is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, a program of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. From 2014 to 2018 he was the executive director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation. From 1989 to 2014 he was the director of antisemitism, hate studies and extremism for the American Jewish Committee. In 2000, Stern was a special advisor to the defense in the David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial. His 2020 book, The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, examines attempts of partisans of each side to censor the other, and the resulting damage to the academy.
Education
Stern earned his A.B. at Bard College, and his J.D. from Willamette University College of Law.
Career
Stern has testified before US Congress; in 1997 he served as an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes. With Dina Porat, he has analyzed the American militia movement, bigotry on campus, hate on talk radio and the Internet. He is a frequent guest on national television and talk radio shows, including Face the Nation, Crossfire, Nightline, Dateline, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, and National Public Radio. His report Militias: A Growing Danger, issued two weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing, predicted such attacks on the US government. And his book about the militias, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (1996) was nominated for the National Book Award.
In 2001 he was an official member of the United States delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on Combating Intolerance. Stern was one of the drafters of a Working Definition of Antisemitism, which has been adopted, starting in January 2005, by various international bodies tasked with monitoring antisemitism.
Before coming to AJC in 1989, Stern was managing partner of the Oregon law firm Rose and Stern. Stern was trial and appellate counsel for American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks, and argued on his behalf before the United States Supreme Court in U.S. v. Loud Hawk et al. Among his other notable cases was his representation of Portland's homeless community in a federal lawsuit against an anti-camping ordinance, and as co-counsel in a defamation suit against Patricia Hearst, representing Jack and Micki Scott. His book about the Dennis Banks case, Loud Hawk: The United States vs. the American Indian Movement (1994), won the Gustave Myers Center Award as outstanding book on human rights.
Stern's other books are Holocaust Denial (1993) and Antisemitism Today (2006).
Stern is also active in the effort to establish an interdisciplinary academic field of Hate Studies. He previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Hate Studies, and is a longtime member of the director's advisory board for the Gonzaga University Institute for Hate Studies.
Views
In his article Holocaust education alone won't stop hate, Stern proposes ways to combat persisting hatred of Jews:
In an open letter, coauthored with Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, Stern wrote that some of the complaints about anti-Semitism on campus under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "simply seek to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers. This approach is not only unwarranted under Title VI, it is dangerous." Stern's letter was disavowed by AJC executive director David Harris, who called the letter "ill-advised." In 2017 Stern testified before the House Judiciary Committee against legislation that would have used a definition of antisemitism, of which he was the lead drafter, as a de facto hate speech code on campus.
In his 2006 book Antisemitism Today, Stern wrote:
In his book A Force upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, Stern links Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh with the American militia movement. In a review in Reason, Dave Kopel concludes that he "does not come remotely close to showing that militia members encouraged McVeigh to do anything illegal", but uses circumstantial evidence, guilt by association and undocumented quotes that turn out to be false. Not only militias, but all critics of big government are excoriated in the book. After the 1994 elections, Stern found that "the vitriolic antifederal sentiments of some of these newly elected officials" differed "in detail but not in flavor" from the ideas of racist gangs. Kopel considers his use of charges of antisemitism and racism as a way of vilifying opponents and delegitimizing political stands he does not like. But Patsy Sims, writing in The New York Times, noted:
In December 2019, Stern, who has previously served as the lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, expressed concerned that right-wing Jewish groups and national governments were using the document to silence what he regarded as legitimate criticisms of Israel. Stern also claimed that the US President Donald Trump's 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism would stifle Palestinian free speech rather than protecting Jewish students. In December 2020, Stern urged the incoming Biden Administration not to adopt the IHRA Working Definition, claiming that it had been weaponized by pro-Israel lobby groups to silence criticism of Zionism.
See also
Hate studies
Universities and antisemitism
Notes
Publications
Books
Holocaust Denial (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993)
Loud Hawk: The United States Versus the American Indian Movement (1994) University of Oklahoma Press, 2002:
The Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (Simon & Schuster, 1996) (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997: )
Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different and How to Fight It (American Jewish Committee, 2006):
Articles and other publication
Skinheads: Who They Are and What to Do When They Come to Town (The American Jewish Committee, 1990)
Anti-Zionism, the Sophisticated Anti-Semitism (AJC, 1990).
on Campus: A Planned Response, 1990
Dr. Jeffries and the anti-Semitic branch of the Afrocentrism movement, 1991
David Duke: A Nazi in politics, 1991
Hate on talk radio, 1991
Politics and bigotry, 1992
Farrakhan and Jews in the 1990s (AJC, 1992, 1994).
Crown Heights: A case study in anti-Semitism and community relations, 1992
Demjanjuk: An analysis of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Demjanjuk v. Petrovsky, et al., 1993
Liberators: A background report, 1993
Militias, a growing danger (An American Jewish Committee background report, 1995)
A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, 1996
The McVeigh trial 1997
Militias and the religious right Freedom Writer, October 1996. (Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1998)
Hate and the Internet (AJC)
Lying About the Holocaust (SPLC Intelligence Report, Fall 2001)
Why Campus Anti-Israel Activity Flunks Bigotry 101
Getting to the root of hate in a challenging world Seattle Times. March 16, 2004
The Minister For Hate (The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan). Published in J.O.I.N. Australia/Israel Review, 1998. Also at
Holocaust education alone won't stop hate. Jewish SF. January 26, 2007. Also at Jewish United Fund 404 Error,
About Monitoring and Law Enforcement, Not Education (jewishexponent.com) February 1, 2007
Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It is Different, and How to Fight It"
Anti-Semitism Matters''
Hate Matters A condensed version of Stern's keynote speech at the First Conference to Establish the Academic Field of Hate Studies
The Dangerous "A" Words
Don't Avoid Conflicts, Mine Them.
External links
Truth Is Winner in Holocaust Denier's Libel Defeat Newsday, April 13, 2000, p. A54. (nizkor.org)
Is Uncle Sam coddling the Kooks? By Jonathan Broder (Salon.com)
The County Supremacy and Militia Movements: Federalism as an Issue on the Radical Right by William Chaloupka (University of Montana)
Cause for Concern: Hate Crimes in America. Reports and Curricula (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights/Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund)
Historians of Nazism
Holocaust denial
Jewish American historians
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Scholars of antisemitism
Historians of the Holocaust
Willamette University College of Law alumni
Bard College alumni
American Jewish Committee