Stern earned his A.B. at Bard College, and his J.D. from Willamette University College of Law.

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.

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. That position has been criticized by Arthur Neslen, who points out that Stern blurs the distinction between anti-Zionism, the political criticisms of Israeli policy and Antisemitism. By this standard, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein would be considered anti-Semites.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/05/whenanantisemiteisnotana

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.

Monitoring groups must catalog not only the old-fashioned forms of religious and racial anti-Semitism, but also the more contemporary forms that treat the Jewish state in the same bigoted manner that traditional anti-Semitism regards the individual Jew. Campus administrations need to uphold the highest academic standards and make certain that while heated debate is encouraged, intimidation is prohibited."

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: ISBN 0806134399
• The Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (Simon & Schuster, 1996) (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997: ISBN 0806129263)
• Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different and How to Fight It (American Jewish Committee, 2006): ISBN 9780874951400

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).
• David Duke: A Nazi in politics, 1991
• Dr. Jeffries and the anti-Semitic branch of the Afrocentrism movement, 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)
• 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 (SLPC Intelligence Report, Fall 2001)
• Battling Bigotry on Campus
• 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 [1]
• Holocaust education alone won't stop hate. Jewish SF. January 26, 2007. Also at [2], [3]
• 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