Nationality American Genre non-fiction, history | Name Kenneth Stern Role Attorney | |
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Occupation Defense Attorney, Author Subject antisemitism, hate studies Books A force upon the plain, Loud Hawk, Antisemitism today, Holocaust Denial Education Willamette University College of Law, Bard College | ||
Kenneth S. Stern is an American defense attorney and an author. He is executive director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation. From 1989 to 2014 he was director on 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.
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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. He analyzed the militia movement, bigotry on campus, hate speech 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 also a key drafter 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 director's advisory board for the Gonzaga University Institute for Hate Studies, and he remains on the editorial board of the Journal of Hate Studies.
Views
In his article Holocaust education alone won't stop hate, Stern proposes ways to combat persisting hatred of Jews:
"Human rights organizations must be challenged when they do not sufficiently assert that freedom from anti-Semitism is a human right.
Governments must be engaged to ensure that they investigate and prosecute anti-Semitic hate crimes fully.
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 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 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 anti-Semitism and racism as a way of vilifying opponents and delegitimizing political stands he does not like.