Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the renowned sex therapist who had a culturally iconic career spanning decades and became known to millions as “Dr. Ruth,” died Friday at her Manhattan home. She was 96 years old.
People magazine, citing her publicist and co-author Pierre Leff, reported that she died on Friday. No cause of death was given, but other reports said she died at her New York City home surrounded by her family.
A German-born woman who lost both parents in the Holocaust, Westheimer didn’t become famous until she was in her 50s, when she began hosting a pioneering radio show in New York City called “Sexual Speaking.”
Known simply as Dr. Ruth, she used her fame in later years to host television shows, appear in a number of films and write some 40 books to instruct millions of fans on how to have a more satisfying sex life.
Westheimer was small, only 4 feet 7 inches (1.4 meters) tall, but her womanly looks and cheerful demeanor made her an easy person to trust to talk frankly about intimate relationships.
Her life story includes many chapters, including a harrowing escape from Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee, serving as a sniper in the Israeli army, and working as a housekeeper in New York City before earning a doctorate at Columbia University and beginning her career as a sex therapist.
She remains active well into her 90s, telling People magazine in 2023 how she stays youthful and contemporary: “I talk about sex from morning until night! That’s the secret to staying young.”
From sniper to sex therapist
The only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Carola Ruth Siegel was born on June 4, 1928, in Wiesenfeld, Germany.
When she was 10, the Nazis took her father to a concentration camp in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic pogroms known as Kristallnacht. As the drums of war grew louder, her mother and grandmother put her on a train to an orphanage in Switzerland. She never saw her parents again.
After the war, she emigrated to what was then British-managed Palestine, where she joined the Zionist underground and trained for military action. She was seriously injured in an explosion during the war that ended with Israeli independence.
In 1950, she moved to Paris with her husband, an Israeli soldier, and studied at the Sorbonne. Recently divorced, she moved to New York City to raise her daughter, Miriam, from a brief second marriage.
In 1961, she married a third time, to Manfred Westheimer, also a Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor, and they remained married until his death in 1997. They had one son, Joel.
After completing her studies, Westheimer worked for pioneering sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan before launching her own radio show in New York in 1980.
Within two years, she had become a household name on national radio and television.
With her frank discussions of female orgasm, masturbation, homosexuality, consent and other bedroom topics, this little Jewish dynamo has captured the hearts of a nation hungry for honest answers.
Her nonjudgmental nature put people at ease, and her advice was often short and direct: have sex before dinner, enjoy and share your fantasies, and be flexible with partners who have different sexual appetites.
She avoided the word “normal,” suggesting that anything done in private between consenting adults was OK. She also supported the legalization of prostitution, a controversial move.
Her book, “Sex for Dummies,” has been published in 17 languages.
“A very good shooter”
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, some were outraged by Westheimer’s stance on consent.
“The idea that if you start to get aroused, you should ask, ‘Can I touch your left breast or your right breast?’ is complete nonsense,” she told The Guardian in 2019.
Westheimer doted on his children and grandchildren and shared his checkered history with them, including his career as a sniper fighting for Israeli independence.
“I was a good shooter. I once went with my grandson to a county fair where we shot water guns at a clown’s mouth. We came home with 12 stuffed animals and a goldfish,” she said.
In 2009, Playboy magazine ranked her 13th on its list of the 55 most important sex people of the past 55 years.
A one-woman play about Westheimer’s life, “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” was performed off-Broadway in 2013, and a documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” was released in 2019.
She appeared regularly on TV shows like “Ally McBeal” and “Melrose Place,” and also had cameo roles in numerous films.
Westheimer always expressed gratitude for having survived the Holocaust and felt it was his duty to give something back.
“I never knew my ultimate contribution to the world would be to talk about orgasms and erections, but I knew I had to do something for other people to justify being alive,” she told Harvard Business Review in 2016.
