In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Robert Jaffe, Morningstar Professor of Science at MIT. Jaffe recounts his childhood in Connecticut and his early interest in natural history and his advanced chemistry education in high school. Jaffe described his undergraduate education at Princeton where he developed his interests in both physics and social justice issues. Jaffe describes his formative summer in Europe in 1968 and his decision to pursue his graduate work at Stanford. Jaffe explains the formative role of Sid Drell and SLAC in developing his dissertation on the difference between the parton model and the current algebra approach to deep inelastic physics. Jaffe describes his initial attraction to join MIT, which he felt was uniquely egalitarian, and his development as a professor there over the course of his career. Jaffe describes his advisory work at Brookhaven Lab, and his more recent interests in the physics of energy. Toward the end of the interview, Jaffe reflects on why he believes theoretical physics is the natural domain of younger scholars, and what he considers to be his primary contributions to the field.