Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the famed sex therapist whose culturally iconic career spanned decades and helped her become known to millions as “Dr. Ruth,” died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
People magazine, quoting her publicist and sometime co-author Pierre Lehu, said she died on Friday. It gave no cause of death, but other reports said she died at home in New York City with family members present.
The German-born Westheimer, who lost both of her parents in the Holocaust, reached fame only in her 50s when she began hosting a pioneering radio show in New York City called “Sexually Speaking.”
Known simply as Dr. Ruth, she capitalized on her late-in-life fame, going on to host a television show, appear in many films and coach millions of fans in some 40 books about how to have a more satisfying sex life.
Westheimer’s diminutive stature – she was only 4-foot-7 (1.4 meters) – her matronly appearance and her cheerful demeanor made her an easily trusted conduit for straight talk about intimacy.
Her life contained many chapters, including a harrowing escape from Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee, a stint as a sniper in the Israeli army, and another as a housekeeper in New York City before obtaining her doctorate from Columbia University and embarking on life as a sex therapist.
She was active well into her 90s, explaining to People magazine in 2023 how she remained youthful and relevant: “Talking about sex from morning ’til night! That keeps you young.”
From sniper to sex therapist
The only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Karola Ruth Siegel was born on June 4, 1928 in Wiesenfeld, Germany.
When she was 10, the Nazis took her father to a concentration camp shortly after the anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. As the drumbeat of war grew louder, her mother and grandmother put her on a train for an orphanage in Switzerland. She never saw her parents again.
After the war, she emigrated to what was then British-controlled Palestine and joined an underground Zionist group, training for military action. She was badly wounded in an explosion during the war that ended with Israel’s independence.
In 1950, she moved with her new husband, an Israeli soldier, to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne. Newly divorced, she emigrated to New York City and began raising a daughter, Miriam, from a brief second marriage.
Her third marriage in 1961 was to a fellow Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor, Manfred Westheimer, a union that lasted until his death in 1997. They had a son, Joel.
After her studies, Westheimer worked with pioneering sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan before launching her New York radio show in 1980.
In less than two years, she became a household name with nationally syndicated radio and television shows.
The tiny Jewish dynamo — offering frank talk about female orgasm, masturbation, homosexuality, consent and other bedroom topics — reached a nation eager for plainspoken answers.
Her nonjudgmental nature put people at ease, and her advice was often pithy and direct: have sex before dinner, enjoy and share fantasies, and be flexible with partners with differing appetites for sex.
She shunned the word “normal,” suggesting that anything between two consenting adults done in privacy was fine. She also supported legalized prostitution, which generated some controversy.
Her book “Sex for Dummies” was published in 17 languages.
‘Very good shooter’
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, some chafed at Westheimer’s attitudes on consent.
“This idea that once you are aroused and have already started that you should then ask, ‘Can I touch your left breast, or your right breast?’ is just nonsense,” she told The Guardian in 2019.
Westheimer adored her children and grandchildren, and shared her complicated history with them, including as a sniper fighting for Israel’s independence.
“I was a very good shooter. I once went with my grandson to a county fair where you shoot a water pistol at the clown’s mouth. We came home with 12 stuffed animals and a goldfish,” she said.
In 2009, Playboy magazine listed her as Number 13 in its list of the 55 most important people in the sex field from the past 55 years.
A one-woman play based on Westheimer’s life, “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” ran off-Broadway in 2013, and a documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” was released in 2019.
She popped up regularly on television shows, including “Ally McBeal” and “Melrose Place,” and had cameos in numerous movies.
Westheimer always communicated her gratitude for surviving the Holocaust, and felt it was her duty to offer something in return.
“I did not know that my eventual contribution to the world would be to talk about orgasms and erections, but I did know I had to do something for others to justify being alive,” she told the Harvard Business Review in 2016.
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