Dr. Ruth Westheimer participates in the “Ask Dr. Ruth” panel at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour on February 11, 2019 in Pasadena, California. Westheimer died Friday at the age of 96.
Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP
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Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP
NEW YORK — Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author through her candid talks on once-taboo bedroom topics, has died. She was 96.
Westheimer died Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by family, according to her spokesman and friend Pierre Lehu.
Westheimer never endorsed risky sexual behavior. Instead, she encouraged open dialogue about previously hidden issues that affected her millions of viewers. Her recurring theme was that there was nothing to be ashamed of.
“I still have old-fashioned values and I’m a little bit rigid,” she told students at Michigan City High School in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But it’s still a subject we have to talk about.”
Westheimer’s husky, German-accented voice, coupled with her 4-foot-7-inch stature, makes her an unlikely medium for disseminating “sexual knowledge.” This contradiction is one of the keys to her success.
But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, nonjudgmental demeanor, that brought her local radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” to national attention in the early 1980s. She took a nonjudgmental approach to what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes.
“Tell him you won’t take the initiative,” she told a worried caller in June 1982. “Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said you won’t die if he doesn’t have sex for a week.”
Her radio success opened new doors, and in 1983 she wrote the first of more than 40 books: “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” which deciphered sex with both reason and humor. There was even a board game, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex.
She soon became a regular on late-night television talk shows, taking her personality to the national stage. Her rise coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank talk about sex became a necessity.
“If we can talk about sexual activity the way we talk about diet—the way we talk about food—without implying that there is something wrong with it, then we have gone a step further. But we have to do it with sensitivity,” she told Johnny Carson in 1982.
She normalized the use of words like “penis” and “vagina” on radio and TV, thanks to her Hebrew accent, which The Wall Street Journal once said was “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.” People magazine named her one of the “Most Fascinating People of the Century.” She even put her accent to a Shania Twain song: “No, I don’t need no proof to prove the truth/Not even Dr. Ruth can tell me how I feel.”
Westheimer defends abortion rights, recommends that older adults have sex after a good night’s sleep, and is a strong proponent of condom use. She believes in monogamy.
In the 1980s, she stood up for gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic and spoke out in support of the LGBTQ community. She said she defended people who were considered “subhuman” by some far-right Christians because of her own past.
Born Karola Ruth Seigel in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1928, she was an only child. At age 10, her parents sent her to Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht—the 1938 Nazi massacre that was a precursor to the Holocaust. She never saw her parents again; Westheimer believes they were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
At 16, she moved to Palestine and joined the Haganah, an underground movement fighting for Israeli independence. She was trained as a sniper, although she says she never shot at anyone.
Her legs were severely damaged when a bomb exploded in her dormitory, killing many of her friends. She says it was only thanks to the work of an “amazing” surgeon that she was able to walk and ski again.
She married her first husband, an Israeli soldier, in 1950, and they moved to Paris while she pursued her education. Despite not graduating from high school, Westheimer was admitted to the Sorbonne to study psychology after passing the entrance exam.
The marriage ended in 1955; the following year, Westheimer moved to New York with her new boyfriend, a Frenchman who became her second husband and the father of her daughter Miriam.
In 1961, after her second divorce, she finally met her life partner: Manfred Westheimer, another refugee from Nazi Germany. The couple married and had a son, Joel. They remained together for 36 years until “Fred”—as she called him—died of heart failure in 1997.
After receiving her doctorate in education from Columbia University, she went on to teach at Lehman College in the Bronx. While there, she developed a specialty—teaching professors how to teach sex education. It eventually became the core of her curriculum.
“I soon realized that although I knew enough about education, I really didn’t know enough about sex,” she wrote in her 1987 autobiography. Westheimer then decided to take classes with renowned sex therapist Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan.
It was there that she discovered her calling. Before long, as she once put it in a popular commentary, she was giving sex advice “like good chicken soup.”
“I come from an Orthodox Jewish family, so for Jews, sex was never considered a sin,” she told The Guardian in 2019.
In 1984, her radio show was broadcast nationally. A year later, she launched her own television show, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” which later won an Ace Award for excellence in cable television.
She also wrote a nationally syndicated advice column and later appeared in a series of videos produced by Playboy, preaching the virtues of open sexual discourse and healthy sex. She even had her own board game, “Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex,” and a series of calendars.
Her rise was notable given the culture of the time, as President Ronald Reagan’s administration was hostile to Planned Parenthood and aligned itself with conservative advocacy voices.
Phyllis Schlafly, a staunch anti-feminist, wrote in a 1999 article called “The Perils of Sex Education” that Westheimer, as well as Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres and others, were promoting “provocative conversations about sex” and “rampant immorality.”
Father Edwin O’Brien, communications director for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York who later became a cardinal, called her work sad and morally compromising.
“It’s pure hedonism,” O’Brien wrote in a 1982 op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal. “’The message is indulge yourself; whatever makes you feel good is good. There is no higher moral code, and no responsibility.”
Westheimer has appeared on “The Howard Stern Radio Show,” “Nightline,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” “The Dr. Oz Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman.” She has played herself in episodes of “Quantum Leap” and “Love Boat: The Next Wave.”
Her books include “Sex for Dummies,” the autobiographical works “All in a Lifetime” (1987) and “Musically Speaking: A Life through Song” (2003). The documentary “Ask Dr Ruth” aired in 2019.
While working as a radio and television host, she remained committed to teaching, with positions at Yale, Hunter, Princeton, and Columbia universities and a busy university teaching schedule. She also maintained a private practice throughout her life.
Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College-Institute of Religion for her work on human sexuality and her commitment to Judaism, Israel, and religion. In 2001, she received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Leo Baeck Medal, and in 2004, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Trinity College.
Ryan White, director of “Ask Dr. Ruth,” told Vice in 2019 that Westheimer has never been a trend follower. She has always been an ally of gay rights and a supporter of family planning.
“She was a champion of both of those things throughout her life. I met friends of hers from the orphanage and they said that even though she encountered gay people throughout her life in the 30s, 40s and 50s, she was always accepting of them and always said that everyone should be treated with respect.”
She leaves behind two children, Joel and Miriam, and four grandchildren.
