Ken Stern | Hate, Memory, Binary Thinking, and the Future of Democracy

Kenneth S. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and an attorney and award-winning author. For twenty-five years, he was the American Jewish Committee's expert on antisemitism. He has argued before the Supreme Court of the United States, testified before both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. was an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, and served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Stockholm Forum on Combating Intolerance. He has been a visiting assistant professor of Jewish Studies and a visiting assistant professor of Human Rights at Bard College. He is co-chair of the Higher Education/Hate Studies working group for the Eradicate Hate Global Summit.

Mr. Stern’s op-eds and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and elsewhere. Mr. Stern has appeared on the CBS Evening News, CBS Morning News, Dateline, Good Morning America, Face the Nation, the History Channel, NBC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and many other television and radio programs, including National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and WNYC's On the Media. He has been profiled in The New Yorker.

As a trial attorney before his AJC tenure, Stern was involved in several high-visibility cases, among them his defense of American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks in one of the last post-Wounded Knee cases (his book about this case, Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The xAmerican Indian Movement won the prestigious Gustavus Myers Award). His book about the Oklahoma City bombing -- A Force Upon The Plane: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate -- was nominated for the National Book Award. He also has written books on antisemitism and on Holocaust denial. His most recent book is The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (New Jewish Press, 2020).