COMMENTARY
A Son’s Eulogy for Midge Decter (1927-2022)
John Podhoretz
May 12, 2022

Where did she come from? That’s what we were asking ourselves, my sister and my father and I, after she left us and this world on the morning of May 9, 2022. Of course, we know where she came from in the strictest sense. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. Her mother had also been born, amazingly enough for a Jew, in the Twin Cities in the year 1894, the youngest of ten whose parents had immigrated from Lithuania quite a while earlier. And her father? His mother bore him at 14 in Poland after marrying a much older man over her own parents’s objections. He was a widower with children of his own who turned out to be a drunk. He beat her one night when she was newly pregnant. READ MORE

This eulogy was delivered at the funeral of Midge Podhoretz, which took place on May 11 at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City. She died on May 9, 2022, at the age of 94.