World famous Jewish sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer dies at 96
Talk show host, who became a cultural icon decades after surviving Holocaust and fighting for Israel’s independence, was fond of citing her grandkids to say ‘Hitler lost and I won’
Amy Spiro is a reporter and writer with The Times of Israel
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a groundbreaking sex therapist, radio host, TV personality as well as a Holocaust survivor and a Haganah veteran, died at age 96 on Friday in New York City.
Westheimer, better known around the world simply as “Dr. Ruth,” lived a remarkable and colorful life long before she even began her media career at the age of 52. A Holocaust survivor, she later emigrated to pre-state Israel and served in the Haganah until she was seriously wounded during the Independence War. She then moved to France before settling in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
Starting with a radio show in 1980 – after years of working as a sex therapist – she gradually became a media icon and major cultural figure, making regular TV appearances and becoming one of the most well-known and outspoken advocates for comprehensive sex education.
Born in Wiesenfeld, Germany, in 1928 as Karola Ruth Siegel, she settled as a child in Frankfurt with her Orthodox Jewish parents and her maternal grandmother. In early 1939, weeks after her father was arrested during Kristallnacht, Westheimer was sent to Switzerland on a Kindertransport. The rest of her family members were murdered in the Holocaust, and she never saw them again.
“Looking at my four grandchildren: Hitler lost and I won,” she was fond of saying.
Many years later, she became active with The Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, and has been outspoken on Holocaust education. She has urged people to visit the museum: “It’s like a grave for my family who don’t have graves.”
From an orphanage in Switzerland, Westheimer made her way to Mandatory Palestine at just 16. Several years later she joined the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF, and trained as a sniper. The diminutive fighter – she famously stood at just 4’7” (140 cm) – was seriously wounded in 1948 by an artillery shell.
“Though I am only 4 feet 7 inches tall, with a gun in my hand I am the equal of a soldier who’s 6 feet 7 — and perhaps even at a slight advantage, as I make a smaller target,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1990 about women serving in combat positions.
Two years after her injury, she moved to Paris with her first husband, and received an undergraduate degree in psychology at the Sorbonne. Six years after that, in 1956, she moved with her second husband to New York, where she received a master’s degree in sociology from the New School.
In 1961, she married her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, and they settled into the famed three-bedroom Washington Heights apartment she inhabited for the rest of her life, raising two children together.
She later earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University before training as a sex therapist. But her career as a public sex guru began by accident, as she tells it.
In 1980 she began hosting a 15-minute local radio show airing at midnight, titled “Sexually Speaking.” Her no-nonsense approach quickly gained her a fan base, catapulting her “from obscurity to almost instant stardom,” The New York Times wrote in 1984, with the launch of her first cable TV show.
Over the next 20 years, Westheimer became a fixture of US television, and even co-hosted a similar show in the 1990s in Israel, alongside TV journalist Arad Nir, titled “Min Tochnit” (a play on words). She never shied away from questions, was outspoken in her answers and frank in discussing topics that had once been seen as taboo for daytime TV.
“The specific sexual questions I get have not changed so much,” Westheimer told The Times of Israel in 2018. “There are always lots of questions about sexual satisfaction, questions about all the dysfunctions. What has changed, because of programs like mine, is the language. People speak much more explicitly now.”
Westheimer penned more than a dozen books on sex and sexuality, including 1996’s “Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition” with journalist Jonathan Mark.
“I believe that I can talk so openly about sex because I’m very Jewish and in the Jewish tradition, sex has never been considered a sin but always an obligation,” she said. “And it’s an obligation for the husband to satisfy his wife.”
Westheimer remained active well into her 90s, and reveled in the attention and accolades she continued to receive: in 2019 she was the subject of a documentary on Hulu, titled “Ask Dr. Ruth,” and in 2021 actress Tovah Feldshuh played her in a one-woman off-Broadway show titled “Becoming Dr. Ruth.”
She continued to offer advice and post witty one-liners to her more than 100,000 Twitter followers and make appearances on behalf of her favorite charities and causes, including many Jewish and Zionist organizations. In 2021, she received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University, where she backed the creation of the Dr. Ruth Westheimer Scholarship in Psychology.
In her virtual comments accepting the degree, Westheimer said she recalls being in Jerusalem in 1948 when David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
“I heard Ben-Gurion declare the State of Israel to be a state, I was in Jerusalem, he talked on the radio in Tel Aviv and we danced the entire night,” she recalled.
Westheimer is survived by two children, Miriam and Joel, and four grandchildren. She was predeceased by her third husband, Manfred “Fred” Westheimer, who died in 1997.
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