After Donald Trump speaks to Congress for the first time since he reentered office, the nation’s broadcasts will turn to Sen. Elissa Slotkin.
The Michigan Democrat has been chosen to deliver her party’s response to Trump’s speech Tuesday night, in what is being closely watched as a bellwether for how the Democrats will contend against a turbocharged Trump.
Slotkin, 48, is a Jewish senator who won a tight swing-state election last year, following six years in the House of Representatives. In a year that was deflating for Democrats across the country, she prevailed as a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat in a state that Trump won and that has a sizable Arab-American minority.
Slotkin’s responsibility on Tuesday night will be to rebut Trump’s State of the Union-like speech, which is likely to focus on the president’s policy priorities.
On one of them, immigration, Slotkin has a riveting family story of her own.
Slotkin was born in New York City but grew up largely on her family’s land in Holly, Michigan, where she lives today. Her grandfather bought the land when he moved the headquarters of the family business, Hygrade, from New York.
Founded in 1914 by Slotkin’s great-grandfather Samuel, a Jewish immigrant from Minsk, Hygrade was a pioneer in processed and packaged meats whose contributions included Ball Park Franks, still the most-sold hot dogs in the country.
Samuel Slotkin was the subject of a two-part New Yorker profile in 1956, when the multimillionaire, then around 70, still lived in New York City. According to the profile, he was one of nine children of a Talmudic scholar in Koidanov, a town outside Minsk that was a center of Hasidic Judaism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Samuel, a hustler from birth, bristled at the family’s expectations and sought to leave Russia to make his fortune in the United States. Too young to get a passport, he decided to emigrate despite his parents’ wishes, swimming across a river to evade German and Russian border police, and hitchhiked across Germany to Holland. The year was 1900, and he was 14.
“When Slotkin, with a dollar eighty left in his pocket, sailed from Holland to America, which at that time admitted immigrants without passports, he had neither the intention nor the desire to become the head of a meat-packing company and make millions,” the profile says. Instead, he thought of himself as an artist but fell into business through the influence of an older brother, then embarked on a series of ventures that steadily expanded his reach in the meat industry.
Samuel Slotkin had come during a peak period in a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States. At least seven of his eight siblings arrived Stateside, according to genealogical records, and his father was buried in New Jersey.
In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, severely limiting immigration and effectively closing U.S. doors to Jews from Eastern Europe on the eve of mass persecution. Most Koidanov Hasids were murdered in the Holocaust.
Elissa Slotkin ran into the great-grandson of Samuel’s brother on the way to being sworn in. She took her oath of office on a book of Torah commentary by women published by the Reform Jewish movement, with which her family has been affiliated.
Slotkin had begun her career working at the CIA, where she served multiple tours in Iraq. In 2018, a wave year for Democrats during Trump’s first term, she won election to Congress, where she emphasized bipartisanship, occasionally crossing party lines to vote with Republicans. A recipient of support from PACs affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, she has voted since Oct. 7, 2023, for Israel-related measures that divided her Democratic colleagues, such as to fund Israel’s military and to equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
As a member of Congress, Slotkin proposed mandating Holocaust education as a strategy to combat the rise of domestic extremism. She was inspired in part by the neo-Nazi and Holocaust-related symbols that appeared during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by supporters of Trump.
On Tuesday night, she will take the spotlight in a speaking slot that hasn’t always brought acclaim to its occupants. Several rising stars of both parties have been tapped to deliver the State of the Union response — only to be panned by viewers and colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
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