Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is no stranger to policy conversations about homeland security and terrorist attacks. As a former CIA analyst and an official at the State Department and the Pentagon, national security has been a top issue for her since her first campaign for Congress, in 2018. 

Now she must apply her policy expertise to a tragedy that is immensely personal: the attack earlier this month at Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., where a heavily armed man with ties to the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah drove an explosive-laden car into the building and opened fire, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No one else was killed.

“As a senator, I’ve had to rush home for five or six mass shooting events. This one was by far closest to home. Knowing the actual people, knowing the head of security, who was the one who secured my family’s events a month and a half ago, it was just particularly personal,” Slotkin, who is Jewish, told Jewish Insider in an interview in her Capitol Hill office last week.

“I think about if my own family had been in the building. I think about my own staff [who] had family members in the building. It just brought it home in a very different way. The line between who I am as a person and who I am as a leader got completely blurred and still is,” she added. 

In an emotional conversation with JI, Slotkin proposed ways for Congress and the federal government to better respond to the threat of violent, antisemitic extremism. But even as she discussed ways to take action, she spoke with alarm about the growing prevalence of antisemitism on both sides of the aisle, which she described as out of control. 

And she was clearly shaken by an attack that was potentially inches away from being much worse.

“I think it could have been one of the worst mass killing events in U.S. history were it not for the private security that happens to be very top-notch there, and everyone doing their jobs almost perfectly,” she said. “I think it just has contributed to a feeling for many inside the state that the very things that make Jewish life valuable are becoming the soft targets.” 

During Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation hearing earlier this month, which took place days after the Temple Israel attack, Slotkin asked the former Oklahoma senator, a Republican, to work with her on improving the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program. She told JI that her conversations with him have continued.

“I don’t think we’re accurately staffed to the threat in the federal government,” she said. “My personal feeling is we’re at the level where we need, between FBI and DHS, a task force on countering antisemitic hate … Right now, we don’t have a special unit where the officers and the intel professionals get really deep on some of the the particularities of Jewish issues.” 

Congress allocated $274.5 million in 2025 to help nonprofits pay for security expenses, a figure Jewish groups believe is far too low. Slotkin wants to see more money for the program, but she also wants to improve the process for the organizations that are approved to receive those funds. 

“I think making that program, which is a very important program not just to the Jewish community, but making that more streamlined, is our responsibility,” she said. “The Temple Israel folks will tell you in detail how cumbersome that grant program is, that even when you get the money, there’s so much paperwork, so many hoops, such a lag, that it’s actually not meeting modern-day timelines.” 

Mullin said similarly in his confirmation hearing that “the amount of paperwork once you’re approved to get the funding flowing, and then the paperwork that’s followed up on is way too encompassing,” and vowed to work to “streamline” the program.

Temple Israel is one of the largest synagogues in the country and one of the best-protected. Not all institutions will be able to offer that same level of security, Slotkin warned. 

“​​Smaller institutions are just left to figure out how they could possibly protect themselves when Temple Israel became a threat,” she said. 

Slotkin is also pushing for a pilot program connected to the grant program that would give “quick reimbursement dollars for local law enforcement to help secure these locations.”

“The local law enforcement communities know how to help secure a location and know how to help secure on High Holidays or on Shabbat or all those things, but they’re often overstretched themselves,” Slotkin said. “If you pay that local police force for their extra time, it brings dollars into that police force [and] provides professional security for Jewish institutions. Nothing’s perfect, but it all just adds another layer.” 

The real issue, Slotkin pointed out, is antisemitism — and she said the playbook used to address extremism before a person becomes radicalized should be better applied to fighting antisemitism. 

“I think there’s a much bigger problem and question about, How do you deal with rampant antisemitism that’s just become normalized on both the left and the right, and sort of stop what we call the ladder of escalation when a person first starts? This is a very classic radicalization ladder that we see for groups like Al-Qaida,” said Slotkin.

She described the ladder like this: a “normal civilian” sitting on their computer who gets radicalized online, then posts hateful content to their profiles, before vandalizing a Jewish institution and perhaps getting into verbal or physical fights, which might then give way to plotting extremist violence. 

“We have to figure out how to stop and intervene before people start climbing that ladder,” she said. 

“I think [the attack] contributed to this feeling for some that this problem is completely out of control, but the threat is now coming from both the left and the right and from mentally ill people in the middle, and we are not positioned properly to deal with that threat,” Slotkin said. “I don’t think anyone in the Jewish community feels like we have figured out the best way, in particular, to deal with left-wing antisemitism. The Jewish community is pretty used to dealing with white supremacy and threats from the right.”

One day after the attack, Slotkin attended Shabbat services with the Temple Israel community. The gathering was held at Shenandoah County Club, which is located across the street from Temple Israel and serves the Chaldean community, a group of Iraqi Christians. A ballroom in the country club was where parents, teachers and children gathered when they were evacuated from the synagogue during the attack. 

Amid the bleak news that followed the attack, Slotkin wanted people to remember what the Chaldeans did. 

“I literally could not contain my emotion when the community was giving a standing ovation as they brought in the religious leaders, Iraqi American men in religious garb, to thank them,” said Slotkin. “In our hour of greatest need, they did not flinch. And I think Jews in our community for three generations will remember that.”