From January 1977 until December 2022, when he became an Emeritus Professor, Ken Stein had taught Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israel Studies to more than 5800 students over 44 years. Presently he is the Founding President of the Center for Israel Education (CIE) and its Chief Content Officer. At Emory University in 1998, he established The Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (ISMI), then the first permanent Institute or Center in the U.S. created exclusively for the study of modern Israel. Growing from the public outreach of ISMI in the early 2000s, which initiated Jewish educator seminars and curriculum writing, he founded CIE in 2008, to focus exclusively on educational enrichment for Jewish educators, rabbis, non-Jewish clergy, students, and young adults. The CIE website began in December 2015 with 500 users that month; in the last week of September 2023, there were 50,000 users to the website, with more than 15% of its users were Spanish readers.
Ken is the author of five books, numerous papers and more than three dozen scholarly articles. In the 1980s, he inaugurated engaging undergraduate student internship programs as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center, at ISMI, and at the CIE. His scholarly expertise focuses on the origins of modern Israel, the conflict’s evolution, Palestinian history, the Arab Israeli negotiating process, U.S.-Israeli relations and Israel education in college and precollegiate settings. Two of his books, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917- 1939 (1984) and Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (1999) have remained standard works in their fields. A third, The June 1967 War: How it Changed Jewish, Israeli, and Middle Eastern History (2017) was published for adult and teen audiences in conjunction with ARZA. At Emory he was the recipient of awards for teaching excellence, life-long mentoring of students and for internationalizing the curriculum. Ken’s fund-raising initiatives were responsible for bringing to Emory College sixteen visiting Israeli professors in the social sciences. As CIE's chief content author, he maintains strict scholarly integrity in teaching Israel through written and digital platforms.
Context, content, and perspective remain the cornerstones of excellence in Israel education. His leadership of CIE has enabled 3,500 Jewish educators and hundreds of thousands of Jewish students across North and South America so that they can deepen their knowledge of modern Israel. He continues to teach in all of CIE’s Israel learning initiatives. Ken was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA) and earned his advanced degrees from the University of Michigan (two MA degrees and a doctorate in Middle Eastern History). In the early 1970s, he was an advanced graduate student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Spring 2006, he was a visiting professor of Political Science at Brown University.
