Harvard University campus on May 24, 2025, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Reuters Connect

This fall, the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program enters its second year at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and welcomes its inaugural cohort at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership. Undergraduates on full four-year scholarships with a $7,000 annual living stipend are pursuing a serious sequence of coursework in Jewish, Western, and American civilization, with a required Israel study experience and a permanent academic home inside two of the most consequential new structures in American higher education.

The timing matters. When Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks received the Irving Kristol Award at the American Enterprise Institute in 2017, he put the case plainly: the founders of this country had the Hebrew Bible engraved on their hearts. The covenantal logic of the Mayflower Compact, Hebraic inheritance that made the Declaration’s self-evident truths intelligible, the dual founding of covenant in 1776 and contract in 1787 – these, Sacks argued, are the source of the American experiment’s durability. Biblical Israel and the United States are the only two nations in history founded both in covenant and in contract, because the founders read Israel’s story as their own.

At the semiquincentennial, that inheritance ought to be transmitted to the generation that will carry the republic forward. The institutions that should be doing the transmission are not. So the Jewish community is doing what it has always done when existing institutions could not or would not serve us: it is building.

A generation of Jewish undergraduates is graduating from the most selective universities in America without ever seriously encountering the texts and arguments of their own civilization. They can recite the casualty figures from Gaza and they cannot explain what a covenant is, why the prophets mattered, or why the Jewish political tradition has anything to say to the American constitutional order. When the encampments came to Penn, to Columbia, to Brown, to Harvard, to my own Sarah Lawrence, Jewish students discovered that the universities had not equipped them, the humanities departments had no intention of equipping them, and Hillel and Chabad – important as they are – were not designed to carry the intellectual freight. They were standing on ground that had never been built underneath them. In ten years, they will be on federation boards and day school committees. The transmission problem is no longer a forecast. It is in motion.

This is what makes the structural shift at public universities matter immediately. In 2023, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees voted to create a new academic unit called the School of Civic Life and Leadership over the public objection of hundreds of faculty who accused state leaders of forcing student education into “preapproved ideological containers.” Three years later, the school is UNC’s fifteenth independent academic unit, has recruited more than twenty faculty, and enrolled nearly 1,000 students this year, with declared minors growing more than 90 percent in a single semester. The Heterodox Academy now counts 45 such civic-education centers at 41 institutions across 25 states, half founded since 2021, almost all at public universities, most created over the determined objection of the faculties they were built to complement. State legislatures, public boards, and public chancellors have proved willing to authorize new academic structures, give them permanent faculty lines and genuine curricular authority, and let student demand do the rest. The older reformist strategy was external – the think tank, the summer seminar, the fellowship. The new strategy embeds the parallel institution inside the gates. It works.

The Jewish parallel is now visible. In February 2025, the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education announced the Robert M. Beren Program on Jewish Classical Education, built on $15 million from the Robert M. Beren Family Foundation, Gary and Lee Rosenthal, and Paul and Karen Levy. In January 2026, the University of Texas at Austin announced the Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, housed inside UT’s new School of Civic Leadership. Both are now the academic homes of the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program, a Tikvah initiative.

The intellectual case for these programs is not defensive. Jewish civilization is not a sectarian add-on to a Western civic curriculum. It is one of the two foundational tributaries of that curriculum. The American constitutional order is unintelligible without the Hebraic inheritance – covenant as the model for binding political community, the prophetic tradition as the model for principled dissent against power, the rabbinic culture of argument as the model for a public life in which disagreement is the precondition of truth rather than the enemy of it. Maimonides and Mendelssohn and Herzl belong in the same conversation as Aristotle and Locke and Lincoln. A civic education that does not include them is not a complete civic education.

That is what distinguishes the Beren and Ackerman programs from the older model. The Jewish studies units that have anchored American higher education for decades produce serious scholarly work and will continue to. But the post–October 7 record has made the institutional distinction unavoidable. Harvard Divinity School, in June 2025, created a new five-year appointment in modern Jewish studies and filled it with a scholar who describes himself as a “counter-Zionist” and presented the choice as a response to “anti-Israeli bias.” Nor has the broader field shown much appetite for internal correction; the director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies was tapped to co-chair Harvard’s antisemitism task force despite his own publicly contested views on Israel. That is the institutional judgment the existing structures are making with their hiring authority. What has not happened, and what they were never designed to produce, is the work of forming a generation capable of reading, defending, and extending a three-thousand-year tradition.

Beren and Ackerman are structurally different. They are not Jewish studies units inside humanities divisions. They are Jewish civilization treated as a foundational tributary of Western civilization, taught inside a civic-education academic unit with dedicated faculty lines, degree-granting authority, an independent budget, and independent leadership. The faculty are hired specifically to do this work, by search committees built for this work, without first being filtered through colleagues fundamentally opposed to the project.

The harder question is what happens at private universities, where most of the children of American Jewish philanthropy actually go to school. The civic-education revival has been almost entirely a public-university phenomenon, because the governing levers – state legislatures, public boards, public chancellors – exist there and do not exist in the private sector. Private universities face no analogous external pressure. Their boards typically defer to faculty governance, and their faculty governance has shown across the last two years that on questions involving Jewish students and Jewish institutional life it intervenes late, narrowly, or not at all. Student senates defund Hillel chapters. J Street U applications stall for six months without administrative response. Faculty bodies pass resolutions on Israel and ignore parallel resolutions on antisemitism. This is what unstructured deference produces.

The implication for Jewish philanthropy is direct, and the window is narrow. The Beren and Ackerman model is replicable, and the philanthropic infrastructure exists to replicate it. It will not be replicated inside private universities without donors and trustees willing to insist on structural independence – independent faculty lines, independent curricular authority, independent budget, independent hiring – as a non-negotiable condition of major giving. Anything less is a center a future provost can defund, a program a future search committee can starve, a chair a future faculty senate can leave vacant. The structures have to be hard.

The students at Florida and Texas this fall will read Maimonides and Mendelssohn and Herzl. Most students at peer private universities will not. In ten years, one group will arrive on federation boards and day school committees equipped to explain why any of this matters. The other will be trying to learn it for the first time. That is the future Jewish institutional life is currently choosing by default, and it is the future the Beren and Ackerman programs are designed to prevent. The question is whether the rest of us are prepared to build at the same scale before the window closes. Not another conference. Not another statement. A school – with its own dean, its own faculty, its own students, its own degree, and its own permanence. At America’s 250th, Rabbi Sacks’s charge at the American Enterprise Institute nearly a decade ago has only become more urgent: don’t lose the American covenant. Renew it before it’s too late. Beren and Ackerman are what that renewal looks like in our generation.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.