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.
