Midge Decter

Midge Decter

New York, New York

Midge Rosenthal attended the University of Minnesota, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and New York University.  Her first job was secretary to the editor of Commentary, the intellectual magazine published by the American Jewish Committee. She later worked as an assistant editor at Midstream magazine, managing editor at Commentary, editor at Harper’s Magazine, and was an editor at Legacy Books and at Basic Books. She also served as executive director of the Committee for a Free World, an anticommunist organization disbanded after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She is the author of several books, The Liberated Woman & Other Americans(1970); The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation (1972); Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975), and Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait(2003). She is on the board of directors of the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at the Institute of Religion and Public Life. Her second husband, Norman Podhoretz, is editor of Commentary. Decter has four children.

Decter’s incisive writing on a range of topics has proven invaluable to the conservative movement. A former editor at Basic Books, her writing has graced the pages ofCommentary, First Things, Harper’s and a number of other publications. A Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City, Decter previously served as Executive Director of the Committee for a Free World, a powerful voice for anti-communism that she voluntarily disbanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Soviet communism. 

Midge’s speech at the 40th Anniversary Gala Meeting of The Philadelphia Society, May 2, 2004: “Foreign Policy: The Next Forty Years”
http://www.townhall.com/phillysoc/decterchicago.htm

In this excerpt from her new memoir, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War, Midge Decter describes her final break with liberalism:
http://www.hooverdigest.org/021/decter.html