RIP …

… Remembering Midge Decter | City Journal.

Commentary was part of Decter’s family, but it was also a key magazine of The Family, a collection of mostly Jewish New York liberal anti-Communist intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s. Decter and Podhoretz were important figures in this group, and their apartment became a hub of activity and social events. In 1964, they hosted a party for Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the recently assassinated president. (Philip Roth referred to her as “the shiksa.”) Former attorney general William Barr’s father was in the Family milieu as well, and Barr recalled in his recent memoir attending “birthday parties at the home of power couple Norman Podhoretz, editor in chief of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a prominent journalist and author.” Decter also wrote for magazines like Harper’s, where she served as executive editor from 1969 to 1971.