Who is Sen. Elissa Slotkin, the Jewish ‘rising star’ speaking for Democrats in response to Trump’s speech?
Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat from Michigan, has been pushing back against Trump for years
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) Jan. 21. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh March 4, 2025
Elissa Slotkin, a freshman senator from Michigan and one of only two Jewish women in the U.S. Senate, is set to deliver the Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress.
The choice of Slotkin, 48, a moderate Democrat from a battleground state that played a crucial role in Trump’s November victory, is particularly notable as Democrats consider their approach to countering Trump’s agenda.
Slotkin, a former CIA intelligence analyst who served three tours in Iraq, was one of 10 Democrats representing a state that Trump won against Vice President Kamala Harris. While she received fewer votes than Harris statewide, Slotkin outperformed her in the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, where Trump won by six points amid anger over Harris’ position on the Israel-Hamas war.
Who is Elissa Slotkin?
Born in New York City, Slotkin was raised on her family’s farm in rural Michigan. Located in Holly, northwest of Detroit, the farm was part of Hygrade Meat Company, which specialized in hot dogs and was founded by her great-grandfather Samuel Slotkin, who emigrated from Minsk in 1900. In a 2017 interview, Slotkin said that her life on the farm tends to intrigue Jews when they get to know her. “I keep hearing, ‘The only Jewish farmers I know are on kibbutzim,’” she said.
Sam was one of nine children born to a Talmudic scholar in Koidanov, a town near Minsk that was a hub of Hasidic Judaism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to a 1956 New Yorker profile. He emigrated to the U.S. at age 14 — at the height of a major wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe — against his parents’ wishes. He swam across a river to evade German and Russian border police, then hitchhiked across Germany to Holland before securing passage to America. The Slotkin family and seven siblings later came to the U.S., and his father was buried in New Jersey.
Slotkin celebrated her bat mitzvah at Temple Beth El, a Reform synagogue outside Detroit that her family helped build.
After graduating from Cornell and Columbia, Slotkin was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency following the 9/11 terror attacks. Fluent in Arabic, after completing a course at the American University in Cairo, she served three tours in Iraq as a CIA analyst. She also served in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, first as a staffer for the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon. Toward the end of Obama’s second term, Slotkin was acting assistant secretary of defense, where she said one of her key responsibilities was ensuring Israel received critical arms to counter external threats.
Slotkin’s time in Congress
Slotkin has said she was motivated to run for office after Trump’s failed efforts to repeal Obamacare in May 2017. Her mother, Judith, died in 2011 from ovarian cancer, after her health insurance lapsed. Slotkin first flipped a Republican seat in the House during the 2018 midterm elections.
She played a critical role in Trump’s first impeachment, leading a group of moderates with national security backgrounds, and was the last Jewish Democrat to sign on to his second impeachment in 2021.
Slotkin, who chaired a subcommittee focused on anti-terrorism in her second term, in 2021 proposed to mandate Holocaust education as a way to combat domestic terrorism. She cited the antisemitic symbols displayed during the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol as a key reason for the initiative. Without Holocaust education, she said, people may not recognize the significance of symbols like a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt or a swastika, or understand the weight of antisemitic tropes about wealthy Jews controlling the world when they hear them at random protests. “You might not think it’s that big of a deal,” Slotkin said.
Slotkin also co-sponsored the Never Again Education Act, legislation that passed in 2020 to establish a clearinghouse of Holocaust resources for educators, administered by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
She also supported a bipartisan House resolution that urged the U.S. government to raise awareness about the disproportionate infertility rates among Jews.
Slotkin is a strong supporter of Israel — receiving financial support from both AIPAC and J Street — and a vocal advocate for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the longtime U.S. policy in the region. After Oct. 7, Slotkin defended Israel’s right to go after Hamas in Gaza and voted in favor of a resolution to forbid the State Department to cite statistics from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
Last May, Slotkin was among 320 lawmakers who voted for the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which classifies most anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
But she also called for a negotiated ceasefire to end the war and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to recognize a Palestinian state as part of a postwar plan.
First Jewish woman to represent Michigan in the Senate
Slotkin narrowly won an open Senate seat in the November election. She took the oath of office on a copy of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, published in 2008 by the Reform movement.
She is one of 34 Jewish members in the current Congress, the fourth Jewish woman senator in history and the first Jewish woman to represent her state.
Slotkin ran into the great-grandson of Samuel’s brother, who is a Capitol police officer, on the way to being sworn in Jan.
During the campaign, Slotkin appeared unaffected by the Harris campaign’s struggles to appeal to the Democratic Party’s left flank, thanks to her targeted outreach efforts. Her campaign spent more than $1 million in Facebook ads that targeted users who had indicated an interest in “Islamic studies,” “Gaza,” “Palestine,” and “Syrian cuisine.” Some ads also excluded users interested in “Jewish studies.” Notably, none of the ads directly referenced Israel or the Middle East. She told a group of Arab voters that her experience as an Iraq veteran gave her a unique understanding of their concerns and a deeper sense of empathy.
Slotkin’s outreach to a national audience
The Michigan Democrat said in a statement that her goal in response to Trump’s speech to Congress would be to “level with” the American people about the issues most affecting them.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described Slotkin as “nothing short of a rising star in our party.”
“As a Jewish Democrat, I could not be more proud to see Elissa represent Democrats tonight,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and a native Michigander who grew up in Slotkin’s district. “What Democrats need in this moment is to recognize that we have, can and will win elections. And Slotkin is perhaps the best example of how we do that.”
Soifer said that since the start of Trump’s second term, Jewish Democrats have been engaged and are eager to fight back against Trump’s agenda. Slotkin, she said, is the best representative of her party in the crucial role of responding to Trump on behalf of American Jews. “She stands with our community on every key issue that we care about — the defense of our democracy, the defense of our freedoms and rights, our security in light of the rise of right-wing extremism, and she is a strong supporter of Israel,” Soifer said.
JTA contributed to this report.
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