Moshe Decter was born in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, and served in the U.S. Army infantry during World War II, where he was awarded the Purple Heart. He graduated from The New School for Social Research. In the early 1950s, following his military service, he joined the Voice of America as its political editor. He later spent four years at the Fund for the Republic, an organization focused on highlighting the excesses of McCarthyism, before serving as managing editor of the left-wing but anti-Communist publication The New Leader from 1958 to 1960. In 1948, he married writer Midge Decter (later Midge Decter Podhoretz), with whom he had two daughters, Naomi and Rachel; the couple divorced in 1954. Rachel Decter Abrams is his biological daughter. A New York intellectual and prominent activist for Soviet Jewry, Decter's articles in The New Leader and Foreign Affairs during the 1950s and 1960s were instrumental in raising awareness about the persecution of Soviet Jews among journalists, policymakers, and the public. He was a pioneer in the American Soviet Jewry movement starting in the early 1960s and established the Jewish Minorities Research bureau funded by a secret Israeli government office. He died on June 28, 2007.