America stands at a historic and harrowing crossroads. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the American experiment is being tested by a level of domestic division not seen in generations. The milestone invites celebration, but it demands something more serious: a national audit.
For American Jews, the moment is especially precarious. The rise of antisemitism-on the far left, the far right, on campuses, online, in the streets, and increasingly in respectable institutions-has shaken assumptions that many American Jews once treated as permanent. The sense of security that seemed to define Jewish life in America is no longer self-evident. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani makes that all too clear.
That is why Eldad Tzioni’s “Reclaiming the Covenant: America’s Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring It Continues “( (2026). ISBN: 979-8-9857084-8-6 )arrives at an important moment. This is not simply another patriotic meditation on America’s founding. It is a warning that the American system does not run on autopilot. The Republic is not a machine that continues because it was once well designed. It is, in Tzioni’s formulation, a living Derech-a path, a way, a disciplined road that must be walked, repaired, defended, and renewed.
At the center of Tzioni’s argument is the idea of the American Covenant. Most nations were historically defined by organic markers: blood, soil, tribe, religion, monarchy, language, or ancestry. America was different. It was founded on a proposition and sustained by a covenantal agreement. Membership was not supposed to depend on who your parents were, what village you came from, or what ancient tribe claimed you. It depended on what principles you accepted.
That was revolutionary in 1776. It remains revolutionary in 2026.
America’s genius was that it created a political community in which people of different origins could belong without erasing their distinctiveness. The covenant did not demand sameness. It demanded allegiance to a shared constitutional order: ordered liberty, individual rights, rule of law, self-government, civic responsibility, and the moral discipline required to live with people who are not identical to oneself.
This is why the current crisis is so dangerous. America’s problem is not merely that people disagree. Free citizens will always disagree. The deeper problem is that many Americans no longer seem to agree on the legitimacy of the common framework that allows disagreement to remain peaceful and productive. Tribalism has begun to replace citizenship. Identity has begun to replace principle. Rage has begun to replace persuasion.
For Jews, this is not theoretical. Jewish safety in America has always depended on the health of the American covenant. Jews have thrived here not because America was perfect, but because the American idea created space for minorities to live as full citizens. When the covenant is strong, Jews are protected by universal principles. When the covenant weakens, Jews become vulnerable to the oldest political disease in history: the search for a scapegoat.
Tzioni’s framework, which he calls “Derechology,” is built around the Hebrew word Derech, meaning path or way. A path is not merely a destination. It requires direction, discipline, and maintenance:
If a road is not repaired, it decays.
If a civic culture is not renewed, it corrodes.
If liberty is not defended, it becomes license for the powerful, the loud, and the ruthless.
This is one of the book’s strongest insights. The American experiment is not threatened only by obvious enemies. It is also threatened by free-riders-citizens who enjoy the benefits of liberty, prosperity, security, and constitutional order while refusing the obligations that make those benefits possible.
They consume the fruits of the covenant without helping maintain the tree.
That free-riding now appears across the political spectrum. Some on the left invoke justice while undermining the constitutional structures that protect dissent, conscience, religion, and minority rights. Some on the right invoke patriotism while treating institutions, norms, and even constitutional limits as disposable when they obstruct factional victory. In both cases, the language of America is used to weaken the architecture of America.
Tzioni understands that the founders could not have imagined every challenge of the 21st century. They did not live in a world of social media algorithms, globalized supply chains, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, mass disinformation, or ideological movements capable of turning resentment into political power in real time. But the fundamental requirements of republican self-government have not changed:
A free society still requires virtue, restraint, literacy, accountability, and citizens willing to hold their own camp to the same standards they demand of their opponents.
That is what Tzioni means by active defense. Freedom requires “anti-entropic action.” Entropy is the natural tendency of systems to decay. Political systems decay too. Trust decays. Institutions decay. Civic habits decay. Constitutional literacy decays. National memory decays. Unless citizens consciously repair them, the Republic weakens from within.
The Jewish analogy Tzioni draws is apt. At the Passover Seder, every generation is obligated to see itself as if it personally left Egypt. The Exodus is not treated as dead history. It must be re-experienced, retold, and recommitted to. Tzioni applies a similar logic to America. The American covenant cannot merely be inherited. It must be accepted anew.
This is the meaning of Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning at the close of the Constitutional Convention. Asked what form of government had been created, Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The quote is recorded in James McHenry’s journal account of the Convention, and it remains one of the most concise summaries of the American project ever offered.
The key phrase is not “a republic.” It is “if you can keep it.”
The Constitution was never a declaration of arrival. It was an architecture of maintenance. The founders built a system, but they knew no system could save a people determined to destroy its own inheritance. A republic requires citizens who understand that liberty is not self-sustaining. It must be taught, defended, practiced, and transmitted.
That is the power of Tzioni’s book. It refuses both despair and complacency. It does not argue that America is doomed. Nor does it indulge the childish assumption that America will survive because it has survived before. The design is strong, but strength is not immortality. The covenant is proven, but it is not automatic. The path is there, but it must still be walked.
As America nears its 250th anniversary, the question is not whether the nation deserves applause for what it has achieved. It does. The question is whether Americans still understand what made those achievements possible.
For American Jews, the answer matters urgently. A fractured America is not a safe America. A tribal America is not a safe America. An America that forgets its covenantal structure will not remain hospitable to Jews-or, ultimately, to any minority that depends on law, principle, and ordered liberty rather than raw power.
The anniversary, then, should not be treated as a victory lap. It should be treated as a renewal ceremony.
The Republic is not a gift we received once and for all. It is a lease Americans must renew, a covenant they must reclaim, and a Derech they must maintain.
The next 250 years will not be secured by the wisdom of the founders alone. They will be secured-or lost-by whether this generation is willing to pick up the tools of maintenance and do the hard work of keeping what it was given.
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