[2] Shortly after the founding of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin in 1919, Stern accepted an invitation to become one of its research fellows in 1920.

[3] There, she began work on the first two volumes of Der preussische Staat und die Juden, a study of Jewry under Frederick William I of Prussia, published in 1925.

In 1938 one of the volumes was ready to be published by the Schocken Verlag, but due to Nazi policy all the stock, including her manuscript and many documents were burned during Kristallnacht.

In the introduction of Der preussische Staat und die Juden Stern mentions that one copy, dealing with the Jews under Frederick the Great, was saved by an anonymous female employee of Schocken publishing company, who came to their apartment in Charlottenburg at the end of November, 1938.

First they lived in New York; from 1947 to 1955, she was in charge of Jewish-American Archives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, where she worked as an archivist.