Announcing My New Book: Reclaiming the Covenant ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, May 11, 2026

Announcing My New Book: Reclaiming the Covenant

For over twenty years I've been writing about Israel, Judaism, and antisemitism. But I just released a book about America ahead of its 250th birthday.

The topics are not as different as they might appear.

Reclaiming the Covenant: America's Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring it Continues is both a love letter to America and a warning.

The Jewish experience — three thousand years of covenantal thinking, of building communities defined by shared obligation rather than shared ancestry — turns out to be the most precise lens available for understanding both what is so exceptional about America and what threatens it today.

Most nations throughout history have defined membership by what you are — your blood, your soil, your tribe, your religion. America's founders defined it differently: by what you accept. Membership in the American republic has always been open to anyone willing to take on the obligations of self-government, regardless of ancestry or origin. That is the covenant — and it traces directly to the Hebraic tradition the founders themselves drew on.

They were not subtle about it. The founders quoted the Hebrew Bible in their pamphlets and sermons more than any other source. When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were asked to design the Great Seal of the new nation, both independently proposed similar Biblical images of the Israelites crossing the sea and traveling toward a promised land governed by law. When George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport in 1790, he told them that "it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." He was not extending a courtesy. He was describing the structural logic of the republic itself: in a covenantal nation, Jewish belonging requires no majority's permission.

This is why Jewish history illuminates American history so precisely. Both traditions define membership through covenant — through acceptance of shared obligations — rather than through ethnicity or origin. America's genius was to apply that ancient Hebraic model to a modern republic, creating something the world had not seen before: a nation where you could be fully yourself and fully American at the same time. European states were turning liberal, but America is both liberal and pluralistic - and that is a difference that is not commonly noticed.

That architecture is now under serious pressure. The left has been claiming that groups who are considered oppressed have a superior claim on rights than other citizens, a politics of identity. From the right, a politics of exclusion has been defining the nation by ancestry and culture rather than by shared obligation. Both abandon the founding logic, and both make Jewish life in America more precarious — because Jewish safety has always depended on the health of the covenant, on a republic that protects minorities through principle rather than through the majority's goodwill. And history shows that where Jews aren't safe, neither are anyone else.

The Founding Fathers could not have anticipated the technological and social changes of the 21st century. But the genius behind the American experiment applies to us as well. We just need to recover what America really means and adapt it to today.

Reclaiming the Covenant is available now in print and ebook on Amazon, and wherever books can be ordered. I have been serializing it on my America at 250 Substack, where non-paying subscribers can read roughly half of each chapter.

Daniel Pipes writes: "A bold, intellectually rich meditation on what makes the American experiment both unique and worth preserving. With impressive range, Tzioni weaves political philosophy, constitutional history, and Jewish intellectual tradition into a penetrating account of America as a covenantal nation — one grounded not in identity, but in shared commitment. Provocative, erudite, and timely."

Andrew Pessin, Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and Founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, calls it "a penetrating account of America as a covenantal nation — one grounded not in identity, but in shared commitment. Provocative, erudite, and timely."

Reclaiming the Covenant is available on Amazon as a paperback and an ebook, You can order it from your favorite bookstore, ISBN 979-8-985708-48-6 .