First Amendment attorney and columnist Jeff Robbins speaks about domestic and international affairs at Knosh & Knowledge

GREAT BARRINGTON – On Friday, September 20 at 10:45 a.m., Knosh & Knowledge hosts columnist and attorney Jeff Robbins, who will speak about his recently-published anthology, Notes From The Brink: A Collection of Columns on Policy at Home and Abroad.

Robbins will focus his remarks on the state of American politics and journalism, the profound threats faced by Israel, and the lethal scourge of antisemitism on the far right and the far left.

This free Federation program will take place at Hevreh of Southern Berkshires, 270 State Road in Great Barrington.

Jeff Robbins, a nationally recognized First Amendment attorney, former U.S. Delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of a new book entitled Notes From The Brink: A Collection of Columns About Policy At Home and Abroad (Creators Publishing, May 2024). It is a collection of columns written from 2019 through mid-2024, focusing on an America not merely fractured but altogether splintered by extremism, hyper-partisanship, unprecedented vitriol, and widespread disdain for democracy, plus a Mideast taken hostage by genocidal terrorist enterprises funded by Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror.

A Question for Jeff Robbins

One thing I liked most about reading Notes From The Brink is the absence of hindsight – the columns appear as they were originally published and in the same order, which allowed me as a reader to follow your journey responding to current events and compare it to my own. In the five-year period the book covers, can you explain what, as an observer and commentator, you feel you were (overarchingly or specifically) most correct about and what did you get most wrong?

I do feel sure about the threat to democracy, and to whatever can be said to be left of traditional American values, posed by Donald Trump and the movement (of sorts) that he represents. I don’t think enough can be said about that threat, which is why so many of the columns in the book return to that theme again and again. And I likewise have no qualms about the writing about the profoundly unjust political assault on Israel even before October 7, let alone afterward.

What I would say I have “gotten wrong,” in a sense, is that I did not write enough about the legitimate issues that the American Right has with the American Left. This is not to take away one iota from the deplorable (yes, that word) extremism on the Right, and the threat that it poses. But people who have written about the danger of the Right, like me, haven’t written nearly enough about the legitimate concerns that tens of millions of Americans have about the Democrats: the perception, not without basis, that the constituencies that comprise the Democratic Party suffer from holier-than-thou-ism, that they regard those who are worried about unregulated immigration, or crime, or the drug epidemic and other issues as Neanderthals. I tend to think that the resentment of elites, more than regard for Donald Trump, is what fuels the half of the country that seems ready to vote for him. There are real reasons for that resentment, and I regret not having written enough about them.