A Founding Mother of Neoconservatism Reflects on Her First Visit to Israel

The essayist, editor, and public intellectual Midge Decter died yesterday at the age of ninety-four. Among the founders and leading lights of what would come to be called neoconservatism, Decter was best known as a trenchant critic of the sexual revolution; she was also a stalwart opponent of Soviet Communism and defender of Israel. Her “Looting and Liberal Racism” rings in many ways as true today as it did when it was published in 1977. While she is less known for her writings on Jewish topics, her very first essay for Commentary, written in 1954, constituted a perceptive critique of Fiddler on the Roof—a decade before it was ever performed. A brief summary of her six decades of work for that magazine, by Abe Greenwald, can be found here, complete with links to a selection of her articles.