Jewish Democratic senators are fearing for their safety after a rash of ultra-violent antisemitic attacks in the past month.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst, said her synagogue, Temple Beth-El has faced increased threats.
“They are antisemitic to their core, and it’s domestic terrorism, and it needs to treated appropriately,” she told The Independent.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that ICE agents had taken the wife and children of Mohamed Sabry Soliman into custody. This came after police in Boulder, Colorado arrested Soliman for allegedly throwing molotov cocktails at a peaceful demonstration for Israeli hostages on Sunday.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Mark Michalek said that Soliman allegedly used a “makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary device” and chanted “Free Palestine.” The attack left six victims, ranging from 67 to 88, including one Holocaust survivor.
The Boulder attack came only days after a shooting at a Jewish museum left two staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC dead. Elias Rodriguez later told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.”
And in April, police arrested and charged a man with murder and terrorism after he allgedly firebombed the mansion of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. The man accused of arson allegedly did so because of Shapiro’s views about Israel’s war in Gaza after the attack on October 7, 2023.
“I think as a senator and as a Jewish senator, I’ve always lived with a heightened threat perception, and we’ve had people convicted of threatening me so but certainly we watch for that special category of anti semitic hate, since there’s lots of people who like to use that as another reason to threaten,” Slotkin said.
California Sen. Adam Schiff, a felloww Democrat, said that as a Jewish politician with a high level of visibility during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives, he had a heightened sense of the need for security.
“I think probably all the Jewish legislators are thinking about our personal safety,” Schiff told The Independent. “Sadly for for me, that has always been pretty high, so that’s not a new phenomenon.”
For some, the attacks conjure painful memories. The father of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), escaped Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s.
“Those are horrifying examples, got to draw clear a line, not acceptable,” he told The Independent. “Certainly I remember hearing my folks about anti semitism.”
Jewish voters historically tend to vote Democratic, though divisions exist within the party on Israel. Some progressive Democratic lawmakers in the House have said that Israel’s assault on Gaza after October 7 that has led to more than 50,000 deaths amounts to a genocide or war crimes.
At the same time, some Jewish senators have loudly criticized Israel’s government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even while condemning Hamas for the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel that saw some 250 people taken hostage and 1,200 people brutally murdered.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spent some of his youth on a kibbutz in Israel, has regularly criticized the Netanyahu government and has sponsored legislation to block the sale of weapons to the Israeli government.
But Sanders also had family who died in the Holocaust in Poland and criticized antisemitic attacks.
“Antisemitism is a disgusting ideology and we’ve got to do everything we can to combat it,” he told The Independent.
