Midge Decter - Biography

Biography

Midge Rosenthal Decter was born on July 25, 1927 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the daughter of Rose (née Calmenson) and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. She attended the University of Minnesota, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and New York University.

She was Assistant Editor at Midstream, then the secretary to the then-editor of Commentary, Robert Warshow. Later she was the executive editor of Harper's under Willie Morris. She then working in publishing as an editor at Basic Books and Legacy Books. Her writing has been published in Commentary, First Things, The Atlantic, the National Review, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and the American Spectator.

Together with Donald Rumsfeld, Decter is the former co-chair of the Committee for the Free World and one of the original drivers of the neoconservative movement with her spouse, Norman Podhoretz. She is also a founder of the Independent Women's Forum, and was founding treasurer for the Northcote Parkinson Fund, founded and chaired by John Train. She is a member of the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation. She is also a Board member of the Center for Security Policy and the Clare Boothe Luce Fund. She is also a member of the Philadelphia Society, of which she was for a time the President. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Religion and Public Life. She is one of the signatories to Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century. Decter serves on the national advisory board of Accuracy in Media. In 2008, Midge Decter received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.

She is the mother of the conservative syndicated columnist John Podhoretz, the youngest of her four children, and the second by Norman Podhoretz. She is also the mother, by her first marriage, of Rachel Decter (born 1951), who married Elliott Abrams in 1980, and Naomi (born 1952).