Last November, a Jewish Chicago real-estate investor named Rich Silverstein, who is neither particularly tall nor particularly athletic but who happens, by some genetic quirk of fate, to be the father of two very tall Ivy League athletes—Sam, a six-foot-six Harvard senior who was co-captain of its basketball team, and Noah, a six-foot-seven Princeton freshman and rower—had an idea. “The goal was not to be adversarial,” Silverstein tells me. “[Sam] has happily taken a knee in solidarity with every cause that the Ivy League has promoted.”
Beginning in 2020, the Ivy League—which, it is easy to forget, is an athletic league—started taking strong stands on the issues of the day, organizing educational seminars for its athletes and printing T-shirts emblazoned with various anti-hate slogans for its teams to wear when warming up before games.
Most consequentially, through its relationship with ESPN, which gives it hundreds of free public-service announcements per year, the eight-school Ivy League produced a campaign featuring the slogan “8 Against Hate.” “We are teammates,” one TV spot begins. “We are leaders.... We don’t sit on the sideline.... We take action....We believe in our platform. We stand together as one. Black Lives Matter. Listen. Learn. Act.”
Or, as longtime Ivy League executive director Robin Harris put it in a June 2020 statement on the topic, “We are committed to being a visible, vocal and meaningful voice throughout college athletics.... We will foster a culture of inclusion and showcase the many ways intercollegiate athletics can break down barriers of prejudice and discrimination.”
Silverstein’s idea was that the Ivy League could now use this same approach to combat rising anti-Semitism. And so, on November 10, he sent Harris a letter by e-mail, co-signed by 25 other former Ivy League athletes or their parents, reminding her of how, within three weeks of the killing of George Floyd, the Ivy League “publicly condemned racism targeting the Black community,” and how, within two days of the 2021 spa shootings in Atlanta, the league had “condemned violence targeting the Asian community.”
Silverstein also reminded Harris that the Ivy League Web site “promotes education about social justice with specific references to Black History Month, Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month and Pride Month.”
“As members of the Ivy League family we support all these efforts,” wrote Silverstein, “but when the Jewish community needs you the most … WHERE ARE YOU?”
Silverstein then requested that Harris take four specific “tangible actions” on behalf of “past, current and future Jewish athletes competing in the Ivy League.” Suggestions included releasing a statement condemning anti-Semitism, implementing educational initiatives about anti-Semitism for athletes, setting up a league meeting with the parents of Jewish athletes as well as representatives from Hillel and Chabad (the two major Jewish groups on campus), and releasing a new “8 Against Hate” ad that highlights “the hatred Jewish athletes are experiencing.”
But Silverstein’s e-mail received no response from Harris or from any of the members of the Ivy League’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, whom he had c.c.’d.
Four days later, after attending the March for Israel in Washington, D.C., Silverstein called Harris to let her know that the next day he would be visiting his younger son at school, not far from her office at the Council of Ivy League Presidents, in Princeton; might she be free to meet? No, came the response from an assistant.
The next day, he e-mailed Harris again, re-sending her the letter, which by now had more than 100 signatures. This time, he copied all eight Ivy League presidents.
“We are teammates,” one TV spot begins. “We are leaders.... We don’t sit on the sideline.... We take action.... We believe in our platform. We stand together as one. Black Lives Matter.”
According to one Ivy League coach, while in other college leagues the athletic directors are in charge, “within the Ivy League, the college presidents have all the power.”
In the Ivy League, “it takes six out of eight presidents’ votes for anything to happen,” says a former Ivy athlete. “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton usually vote as a bloc. They run the league.” (When asked if these characterizations were accurate, Ivy League Athletics did not respond.)
Within hours of sending his follow-up to both Harris and the Ivy League presidents, Silverstein got a reply. “Ivy League athletics condemns any and all displays of antisemitism and acknowledges the dangers it presents to the world,” Harris wrote. But, she noted, “the approach of Ivy League athletics to respond to world events has evolved since the events you listed. In 2021, the league created a program that states—very clearly and powerfully—it stands against all forms of discrimination, hatred and terrorism, which of course includes any form of antisemitism,” a reference to the “8 Against Hate” campaign.
“My Job Is to Bring People Together”
Meanwhile, the Ivy League’s silence in the face of anti-Semitism on some of its own campuses was becoming a hot topic among Jewish Ivy League athletes and athletic-department employees.
One Jewish athlete I spoke to at Princeton drew a clear distinction between how the events of October 7 were addressed at his school and how they were addressed at several of the other schools in the league—or, rather, were not. Within 24 hours of the attacks, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber condemned Hamas. By contrast, the student says, “I can definitely see why Jewish athletes at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia have probably lost a lot of faith in their institutions and feel neglected.”
Just before winter break, a Jewish athlete I spoke to at Columbia told me that “there has not been a mention of [anti-Semitism or the attacks on Israel] from my sports team or my athletic department. They’re acting like it’s not going on, and you have people in the middle of campus calling for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state.” He has started carrying a pocketknife, and while he still wears his Star of David, he tucks it into his shirt. “This has completely shaped how I go about my day-to-day life.”
A Columbia representative responded with a statement that read, in part, “Antisemitism or any other form of hate are antithetical to Columbia’s values and can lead to acts of harassment or violence. When this type of speech is unlawful or violates University rules, it will not be tolerated.” The rest of the Ivy League did not respond to requests for comment.
Over at Yale, the athletic department is now in the midst of what it has described as a “monumental partnership” with an anti-racism educational company called A Long Talk. But according to one Yale Athletics staffer, while the training he did with the company was “superpowerful and meaningful,” it wasn’t until October 7 that he realized that A Long Talk doesn’t address anti-Semitism.
“Harvard, Yale, and Princeton usually vote as a bloc. They run the league.”
“Why was it O.K. to make a statement about George Floyd and for some reason it wasn’t O.K. to make a statement about October 7?” asks Auburn University’s men’s-basketball coach, Bruce Pearl, a two-time National Coach of the Year who has led teams to 22 N.C.A.A. tournaments and Auburn to the 2019 Final Four. “Even when it comes to murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping—there seems to be two sides to that story. And I can think of almost no place else in the world where that two sides of the coin would exist.”
Pearl, who is Jewish, took his team on a two-week trip to Israel in August 2022. “My job is to bring people together from different walks of life and find things in common,” he says. While on the trip, some of Auburn’s Evangelical players chose to get baptized in the Jordan River. They visited Bethlehem and had lunch at the home of a Christian Palestinian basketball coach. They also went to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, and played three basketball games, including one in Tel Aviv, in front of more than 10,000 fans against the Israeli national team, which at the time included Deni Avdija, an Israeli-Serbian who is now on the Washington Wizards.
While planning his team’s trip, Pearl got involved with an organization called Athletes for Israel, whose goal is to combat both anti-Semitism and racism while “changing the narrative of Israel” by sponsoring team visits. Last summer, the group sponsored Israel trips by the Arizona and Kansas State basketball teams. In celebration of the Abraham Accords, which established full diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, the teams also visited Abu Dhabi.
“Through sports, through leadership, through peace and prosperity things like this are possible,” Pearl says. “Not October 7… We can choose a better path.”
Pearl and his Auburn coaching staff have been wearing pins featuring intertwined Israeli and American flags to every game. At Yale, the men’s-basketball staff wore the pins to the season opener and to the next few games that followed. Recently, Matt Elkin, who is director of operations for men’s basketball at Yale and also executive director of the Jewish Coaches Association (which Pearl co-founded), has been handing out pins to Jewish coaches that he meets at his team’s games.
“Some people are wearing the joint-flag pins, some people are wearing [Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism’s] blue square pins, and others are wearing Bring Them Home shirts,” Elkin says. “But it falls on the specific staff people or athletes to do it however they want. It’s not in some unified way.” (Not, in other words, like matching T-shirts handed out by the Ivy League.)
“You are putting yourself in a position of vulnerability by taking a stand against something as specific as anti-Semitism,” says Bob McKillop, who coached men’s basketball at Davidson College from 1989 to 2022, leading his team—which for three years included Stephen Curry—to 23 conference championships before retiring in 2022. “There are people who are going to be against you, and there are some people who will be for you, and there are some people who will be neutral.... But it’s not like anti-Semitism is some dark secret in a closet somewhere. No, it’s literally front and center right now, and we better start having a lot more courage in addressing this.”
“I can definitely see why Jewish athletes at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia have probably lost a lot of faith in their institutions and feel neglected.”
In the summer of 2018, McKillop, who is Catholic, took his team on a trip to Auschwitz. They even arranged to have an Auschwitz survivor, a twin who had been experimented on by Josef Mengele, accompany them on their trip. “It impacted the lives of our coaches and players at an unprecedented level,” says McKillop. “We had guys crying.”
As McKillop sees it, a trip like the one his team took could be just the thing to make progress against anti-Semitism today. “I personally know the coaches of all the Ivy League men’s sports teams, and they are men of dignity and honor, and I think they would encourage their teams and their schools to participate,” he says.
“Imagine if [Coach] Tommy Amaker took his [Harvard men’s] basketball team to Auschwitz this year and said, ‘We’re going to learn about this,’” says Rabbi Erez Sherman, of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, who hosts a podcast called Rabbi on the Sidelines: The Intersection of Sports and Faith.
In Sherman’s view, more important than an Ivy League statement on anti-Semitism is what he describes as “immersive experiences” for the players. “The average student walking around campus I don’t think will be affected by policy.... But I do know if you have an immersive experience and bring back and share from the heart, and if that’s what your athletic and college experience is giving you, you’re going to be changed by that, for the good, forever.”
“Oy, Harvard?”
Back in Chicago, Silverstein wasn’t giving up. Unsatisfied with Harris’s demurral, he sent another e-mail and letter on November 28. “We wish you could express publicly what you have conveyed privately—that Ivy League Athletics unequivocally condemns Jew hatred,” he wrote. By now, he noted, his letter had more than 200 signatures from Ivy League athletes, alumni, and family members.
“We applaud your efforts to combat other forms of hate, and nothing in this letter is intended to detract from that,” Silverstein wrote. “But the facts below highlight the troubling double standard that your office, and by extension each of your member institutions, applies to the Jewish community.” The league’s D.E.I. “splash page,” he wrote, contains 10 “references or reposts of support” for the Black community, 5 for the Asian, 3 for the Hispanic, and 2 for Pride; it also features 12 stock images of the Black Power fist.
As for Harris’s claim that the Ivy League’s response to world events had “evolved” since 2021, Silverstein noted that just since January 1, 2023, Ivy League social-media accounts had posted messages on topics including Title IX, Pride Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth, and Hispanic Heritage Month. “It has been heartbreaking to see [Jewish student athletes] denied the Ivy League DEI Committee’s basic support extended to other minority groups,” pleaded Silverstein. “We ask you, again, to reconsider. Now is the time to do the right thing.”
The very next day Harris sent Silverstein a brief response: “Dear Mr. Silverstein, This is to acknowledge receipt of your most recent letter … and the hard copy that was delivered to our office earlier today. We continue to value and appreciate your perspective.” Harris did not respond to interview requests or a detailed list of questions from Air Mail.
The league’s D.E.I. “splash page” contains 10 “references or reposts of support” for the Black community, 5 for the Asian, 3 for the Hispanic, and 2 for Pride. It also features 12 stock images of the Black Power fist.
According to Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School who resigned last month from then Harvard president Claudine Gay’s Antisemitism Advisory Committee, it would be preferable for the Ivy League, and colleges in general, not to make political statements at all. “It would free the students to feel that they can take a range of positions,” he says, “without contradicting the institution on which they depend.”
That said, Wolpe concedes, while “it would be ideal if all of these sports teams and universities just got out of the business of making political statements, I don’t believe that they will actually get out of the business of making political statements. If I believed it, I would say fine. But the next time George Floyd happens, the political pressure is going to be so immense they will find themselves making political statements again.”
Having arrived at Harvard back in September, Wolpe knows just how quickly not only positions can change but reputations too. Or, as he put it in a sermon he gave in November at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, where he is the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi, “When I left here, people said, ‘Ohhhh, Harvard.’ Now people say, ‘Oy, Harvard?’”
When we spoke last week, Rabbi Wolpe had just returned from a trip to Israel. What did he think, I asked, of the idea of Ivy League coaches taking their teams to Auschwitz?
“I would actually rather they take them to Israel,” said Wolpe. “I think seeing Jews solely as victims is less effective than seeing Jews as people who have created a country and a civilization and integrated Arabs into that civilization and have forged this remarkable land.... I also think that people’s image of Israel is radically different from the reality.” Nevertheless, he said, “if it was a choice of Auschwitz or nothing, I think that would be an important and powerful experience.”
Johanna Berkman is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. You can read her profile of Jumi Bello, which won the 2023 Deadline Club award for Arts Reporting, here