1928-2024
Latest News: Dr. Ruth Dies at Age 96
Ruth Westheimer, the nationally recognized authority on sexual matters better known as Dr. Ruth, died on July 12 in New York City. The 96-year-old was survived by her children, Miriam and Joel, and her four grandchildren.
A longtime resident of New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Dr. Ruth continued her pioneering work as a sex and relationships therapist into her final days. She was named New York’s first ambassador of loneliness in November 2023 and was writing a book about the topic with co-authors Allison Gilbert and Pierre Lehu. The Joy of Connections is set to publish this fall, on September 3.
Watch the 2019 documentary Ask Dr. Ruth
Who Was Dr. Ruth?
Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, became a household name in the 1980s for her educational radio talk show Sexually Speaking. She found her calling in sex education after escaping the Holocaust as a child, immigrating to New York City in 1956, and getting a job at Planned Parenthood. Her hit radio show was nationally syndicated by 1984 and led to a TV show, newspaper and magazine columns, and more than 40 books. Dr. Ruth died in July 2024 at age 96.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Karola Ruth Westheimer
BORN: June 4, 1928
DIED: July 12, 2024
BIRTHPLACE: Frankfurt, Germany
SPOUSES: David (1950-1955), Dan (1957-1958), and Manfred Westheimer (1961-1997)
CHILDREN: Miriam and Joel
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini
Early Life in the Holocaust
Dr. Ruth was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, in Frankfurt, Germany. She grew up the only child in a privileged Orthodox Jewish family; her father, Julius Siegel, was a prosperous notions wholesaler. Her mother, Irma Siegel, was a cattle rancher’s daughter.
A curious and inquisitive child, Ruth often crept into her father’s library and read his books, which first piqued her interest in human sexuality. However, her carefree childhood was cut short when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Ruth’s world was violently shattered by Kristallnacht, a 1938 Nazi riot persecuting the Jews known as the “night of broken glass,” and seven days later, by the SS who came to take her father. The remaining family members decided to flee Germany to escape the widespread and increasingly violent anti-Semitism.
In 1939, 10-year-old Ruth was sent to the protection of a Swiss school, which eventually evolved into an orphanage for Jewish refugee girls. She never saw her family again and later believed they perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Ruth suffered immensely during this time and was treated like a second class citizen at the school, working as a maid for the Swiss Jewish girls. She frequently caused concern amongst the teachers with her loquacious nature and willingness to share her knowledge on taboo subjects, such as menstruation, with the other girls.
After the war, in 1945, Ruth emigrated with some of her friends to Israel, then Palestine, and became a Zionist. She changed her first name to Ruth and became a sniper and scout for the Haganah, the Jewish underground movement fighting for the creation of a Jewish homeland. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its Independence, and less than a month later, on her 20th birthday, she was seriously wounded when a bomb exploded outside the kibbutz where she lived, taking off the top of one of her feet. Her recovery was difficult and slow.
Move to America, Husbands, and Children
Because of her tiny 4-foot-7-inch frame, Ruth frequently worried she would never marry, lamenting in her diary, “Nobody is going to want me because I’m short and ugly.” However, in 1950, an Israeli soldier from her kibbutz named David proposed marriage, and she accepted immediately. The two moved to Paris, where Ruth studied psychology at the Sorbonne, and her husband studied medicine. As Ruth later recounted to McCall’s magazine, “Everybody around me didn’t have money. We went to cafes and had one cup of coffee all day long. Everybody.” The marriage ended after five years, and her husband went back to Israel.
Upon receiving a restitution check for 5,000 marks (approximately $1,500) from the West German government, Ruth left the Sorbonne in 1956 and sailed with her French boyfriend, Dan, to New York City, where a place to live and a scholarship to the New School for Social Research awaited her. Once in New York, Ruth gave birth to a baby girl, Miriam, and divorced her second husband whom she had married to legalize the pregnancy. She worked as a housemaid to support her daughter while attending English lessons and evening classes at the New School. In 1959, she graduated with a master’s degree in sociology and went to work as a research assistant at Columbia University.
While on a ski trip in the Catskill Mountains in early 1961, Ruth met and fell in love with Manfred “Fred” Westheimer, also a Jewish refugee and a compatible physical match for Ruth at 5-foot-5. That December, they were married. “My first two marriages were legalized love affairs, but with Fred, it was true love,” Ruth wrote in 2020.
Shortly after the wedding, Ruth became an American citizen, and in 1964, the couple had a son named Joel. Fred helped raise and legally adopted Miriam. The couple was married for 35 years until Fred’s death in 1997. In addition to her two children, Ruth had four grandchildren.
Becoming Dr. Ruth
In the late 1960s, Ruth took a job at Planned Parenthood in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and was somewhat alarmed to find herself participating in frank discussions about sex. However, she soon became comfortable and, in 1967, was appointed project director. She simultaneously worked towards her doctorate degree in family and sex counseling through Columbia University evening classes, and in the early 1970s, she became an associate professor of sex counseling at Lehman College in the Bronx. Upon moving to Brooklyn College and promptly being fired, Ruth found herself feeling rejected and destitute, later telling People magazine, “it made me feel as I did when I got kicked out of Germany. Angry, helpless, rejected.”
Sexually Speaking Radio Talk Show
However, Ruth’s life and career took a fortunate turn when she gave a lecture to New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming to dispel the silence around such issues as contraception and unwanted pregnancies. The talk impressed Betty Elam, community affairs manager of the New York City radio station WYNY-FM, and in 1980, she offered Ruth $25 a week to make Sexually Speaking, a 15-minute show every Sunday that aired shortly after midnight.
The show was an immediate success, and Ruth, then in her early 50s, soon had a loyal following. More striking than her accent, which The Wall Street Journal once described as “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse,” was her frank yet humorous approach to sex and relationships. She didn’t use euphemisms, encouraged her audience to practice safe sex, and supported the LGBTQ community and abortion rights. However, the fans who adored her direct and nonjudgmental approach to their sexual queries were equally matched by conservative critics who found her advocacy of contraception and sexual openness threatening and irresponsible. She always took criticism into account but nevertheless insisted that she was providing a much-needed educational service to her listeners. “We don’t have the luxury to not talk about sex,” Ruth later said in Interview magazine.
Producers expanded her time-slot to one hour and opened up the phone lines to allow callers to ask their personal questions on-air. The phone lines were jammed every Sunday night, and producer Susan Brown had to screen the calls to pick out the most interesting and urgent questions. By the summer of 1983, Sexually Speaking was attracting a quarter of a million listeners weekly. The message was clear, America desperately needed Dr. Ruth Westheimer. By 1984, the show was syndicated nationally.
Dr. Ruth Books, TV Show, and More
Dr. Ruth’s career skyrocketed from that point. Her influence expanded to newspaper columns, a column in Playgirl magazine, the Lifetime cable TV series Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and even a board game. In November 1996, she launched a website featuring daily sex tips and advice columns and later expanded to social media and YouTube. She taught, lectured, and maintained a private sex-therapy practice for decades.
A prolific author, Dr. Ruth published more than 40 books including Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex (1983), Sex For Dummies (first published in 1995), and her autobiography All in a Lifetime (1987). Her most recent titles were From You to Two and Stay or Go, both from 2018, as well as the 2019 children’s book Crocodile, You’re Beautiful!
Over the years, the celebrity sex therapist received considerable recognition for her work, including an honorary doctorate degree from Trinity College in 2004 and the Medal for Distinguished Service from the Teacher’s College at Columbia University. In 2009, an off-Broadway play about her life, Becoming Dr. Ruth, opened, and in 2014, another play also titled Becoming Dr. Ruth debuted at the Virginia Repertory Theatre. More recently, she was the subject of the 2019 documentary Ask Dr. Ruth. New York Governor Kathy Hochul named Ruth the first honorary “ambassador to loneliness” in November 2023.
Quotes
- I want people to be sexually active until the age of 99.
- Love at first sight doesn’t exist. The only thing that can exist at first sight is an interest in developing a relationship.
- I know that lots of people are very lonely. I want them to date, but to date intelligently. I’m worried about communication on the internet because we are going to lose the art of conversation.
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