“I’m Okay With Western Civilization,” Says One Ivy League Professor, Bravely

Jeff Robbins, a Massachusetts Democrat, Battles “the Hamas lobby“

The Israel-hating and America-hating Ivy League professors and big-city newspaper columnists these days are so common that it sometimes seems newsworthy, or at least worthy of note, when someone in those categories breaks the pattern.

So when the chance came up to have lunch with Jeff Robbins—a columnist for the Boston Herald who also teaches at Brown University, where he is a visiting assistant professor of the practice of political science—I leaped at the opportunity.

Robbins’s columns for the Herald from 2019 through April 2024 have been collected in a new book, “Notes From The Brink,” with a Foreword by the money manager and philanthropist Seth Klarman. 

A collection of columns is a risky thing; as Kenneth Minogue wrote in his 1973 book “The Concept of a University,” “it is both the triumph and the disaster of journalism to be so exactly attuned to the moment of its production that any single example of it looks odd if it should be viewed at a later time.”

Flipping through Robbins’s book, what is striking is how dramatically, after October 7, 2023, the subject matter turns to the war and what Robbins terms “the Hamas lobby” in the U.S.

After October 7, he says, there was “nothing that mattered as much.”

At least some of the columns hold up pretty well. “Baked Squad: Hard-Left Democrats May Be in for a Thinning” is the headline over a February 6, 2024 column accurately predicting, months beforehand, the impending defeat in primary elections of Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

“There hasn’t been a murderous attack on Israeli civilians that they haven’t ignored, whitewashed or defended,” Robbins wrote.

“Mindless or Spineless: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Elizabeth Warren” was another Robbins column, about the senator from Massachusetts. That headline, at least, might qualify as what the newspaper industry calls an evergreen, or not time-sensitive.

Robbins is a Democrat who used to write speeches for Senator Markey. He’s dismayed by those on the left who are hostile to Israel and to Western Civilization.

Jeff Robbins in Boston, Massachusetts, August 2024.

“There is a view out there that if you are ardently Zionist, you must be a Trump supporter,” Robbins says. “The performance of the Democratic Party on this issue has been shameful.”

Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York—“brilliant”—are notable exceptions.

He says attacks on Prime Minister Netanyahu miss the point. “To say that the carnage in Gaza is Netanyahu’s fault, I don’t see it that way at all,” he says.

A Columbia student group had recently publicly denounced Western Civilization. “I’m okay with Western Civilization. Actually, it doesn’t get the credit it deserves,” Robbins says.

He says he tells his Brown students that studies show outside speakers on college campuses are about 93 percent from the left and 7 percent from the right. The outrage is directed at the 7 percent, as if that is too high. “Could we maybe get it up to 9 percent?” he teases.

Anonymous course evaluations suggest the students in his classes appreciate being challenged, he says.

As for the broader campus climate, especially on the Israel issue, anyone expecting dramatic improvement or calm this fall is out of touch: “We’re about to go into round two,” he says.

Even polls that might appear reassuring, like a recent Harvard/Harris survey showing roughly 80 percent of Americans support Israel over Hamas, can also be seen as troubling. “Twenty percent of Americans support Hamas?” he asks.

Inside the U.S., there’s a war going on, he says, over something he views as “so morally clear-cut.”

As he put in a March 12, 2024 Herald column, “So many who hold themselves out as progressives remain silent about Hamas. They justify it, contextualize it, even defend it. Historians will look back at them, and pronounce them a disgrace.”

How’d Robbins acquire this passion? He grew up in an “nonreligious” Jewish family on Long Island, then read the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” and went to volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel in 1976, the summer after his sophomore year at Brown. As he was preparing to leave, one of the elderly kibbutzniks of Kfar Szold predicted, “you’re going to forget all about us.”

Robbins says he’s returned 21 times since then. “Post October 7, it’s the battle of the remainder of our lifetimes,” he says.

Thank You: The Editors is a reader-supported publication. We are grateful to the paying customers. If you haven’t yet signed up, please, if you can spare the $8 a month or $80 a year, do so today to assure your full continued access, sustain our growth, and support our independent journalism.