Ruth Westheimer, who has died aged 96, was an American psychosexual therapist famous for changing attitudes towards the open discussion of sex. She began quietly in 1980 with a 15-minute recorded show called “Sexual Speaking” that aired late at night on a New York radio station. A year later, the show became an hour-long live phone-in show.
She went on to great success and wrote over 35 books, including Dr Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex (1994) and Sex for Dummies (1995), had columns published in newspapers around the world and developed games, videos, software and her own website.
Her boundless passion, outspokenness, German accent, and height (4 feet 7 inches) made her instantly recognizable, parodied many times, but never forgotten. In her field, she has appeared in a primetime science fiction television series (Quantum Leap, 1985), appeared in a thinly disguised role as Dr. Ruth Weisenheimer in a Batman story (The Dark Knight Returns, 1986), and Sing with award-winning musicians (Tom Chapin, album This Pretty Planet, 1996) He never received sniper training in Israel.
She was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Orthodox Jewish parents, Julius Siegel, a wholesaler of clothing accessories, and Irma (née Hanauer). As an only child, Ruth had a happy childhood; Julius took her to synagogue regularly. She later argued that sex was not only good but heavenly, despite conservative and religious voices that tried to criticize her open attitude, and that her liberal message on sex came from her religion.
When Ruth was 10, her father was taken by the Nazis, and in 1939 her mother and grandmother sent her to a children’s home in Switzerland for safety. In 1941, the home became an orphanage after the letters stopped arriving and Ruth’s family and the families of her classmates disappeared to concentration camps. Ruth never saw her parents again and believed them to have died in Auschwitz.
At the age of 17, she emigrated to what was then Palestine and joined the Jewish underground group, the Haganah, to fight for Israel’s independence. She was trained as a sniper and scout, but was seriously wounded by an artillery shell explosion on her birthday in 1948, three weeks after Israel declared its independence. After a long period of recuperation, she moved to Paris in 1950 with her first Israeli husband, David, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne and worked as a kindergarten teacher.
She divorced in 1955 and moved to New York the following year with her French boyfriend, Dan, where she earned a master’s degree in sociology from the New School for Social Research. She and Dan married and had a daughter, Miriam, but soon divorced.
In 1961, while on a skiing trip, she met fellow Jewish immigrant Manfred Westheimer (known as Fred). She married him nine months later and became an American citizen soon after. Their son, Joel, was born in 1964.
In the late 1960s, Westheimer joined Planned Parenthood in Harlem, New York, and although she was initially shocked by the frank conversations she encountered there, she soon found her calling. She became project director in 1967. In 1970, she received her doctorate in night classes at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her work with Planned Parenthood led her to become a pioneer sex therapist. Helen Singer Kaplan.
In the early 1970s, she became an associate professor of sex counseling at Lehman College in the Bronx, and has taught at Brooklyn College, Adelphi University, Columbia University, West Point, New York University, Calhoun College of Yale, and Princeton University, and was a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Her life and career changed dramatically when she spoke to a New York radio station about the need for sex education programming. Betty Elam of the New York radio station WYNY-FM offered Westheimer $25 a week to produce a sex education program. Sexually speakingA few weeks later, work in the building came to a halt as studio and office workers gathered to listen to this woman whom The Wall Street Journal described as “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.”
Her late-night shows on small, struggling networks were drawing higher ratings than the major channels’ peak-time programs. Westheimer gained instant national fame when she appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman” in 1982. Her cable TV show was soon syndicated nationwide as “The Dr. Ruth Show.”
Her radio show Ask Dr Ruth has been broadcast nationally and internationally, making her well known not only in New York but also in London and Hong Kong. As well as a weekly series on Israeli television, she has also appeared on ITV’s morning show This Morning and on television programmes in Luxembourg, Switzerland and France, speaking English, French, German and Hebrew.
She subsequently appeared on The All New Dr Ruth Show and You’re On the Air with Dr Ruth, and appealed to teenagers and young adults in What’s Up, Dr Ruth? (1989) and older audiences in Never Too Late (1992).
Sex and sexuality were not her only interests: she was also involved in documentaries about family and religious values, Ethiopian Jews and Bedouin women, and was appointed New York State Ambassador for Solitude in 2023. Although she succeeded in making many people understand the need for sexual literacy, she never took herself seriously and enjoyed parodying herself and her message in car and shampoo ads.
She has been awarded many awards and honorary degrees. In 1998, People magazine named her one of the most interesting people of the century, and in 2009 Playboy ranked her 13th among the 55 most important people in sex of the past 55 years in its 55th anniversary issue. She continued to maintain a private practice for many years, offering advice and support through her website, and was the subject of the 2019 documentary Ask Dr. Ruth.
Fred passed away in 1997. Ruth is survived by her daughters, Miriam and Joel, and four grandchildren.
