Eisenstadt was born in 1923 in
Warsaw,
Poland. In the early 1930s, his widowed mother took him to Jerusalem and he was educated in Palestine from the age of 12. In 1940, Eisenstadt studied at the Hebrew University where he received his
M.A. and
Ph.D. in sociology. After the 1947–48 school year, he went back to Jerusalem to be an assistant lecturer in
Martin Buber's department under whom he had written his master's thesis. Eisenstadt stayed at the Hebrew University and began teaching there, served as the Chairman of the Department of Sociology from 1950 to 1969, and also served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities for a few years. Eisenstadt researched broad themes of social change, modernities and civilizations. In honor of Eisenstadt's contributions to sociology Erik Cohen, Moshe Lissak, and Uri Almagor compiled the book,
Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of S.N Eisenstadt. The contributions of this book were written by Eisenstadt's former students and colleagues at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The articles relate to Eisenstadt's major themes in the study of cultures, modernization, and social and political change. Eisenstadt's work touches many different fields of sociology, time periods, and cultures and the editors felt the leading concept of Eisenstadt's work was social dynamics. ==Honors==