Dr. Ruth Westheimer, celebrity therapist who revolutionized public discourse on sex, dead at 96

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust orphan who rose to turn into one of the well-known intercourse therapists in America, a 4-foot-7 superstar with an enormous smile and a penchant for tackling essentially the most taboo of topics with blunt honesty and matronly humor, died Friday at her New York Metropolis residence, based on her publicist Pierre Lehu.

She died simply over a month after her 96th birthday.

“The youngsters of Dr. Ruth Okay. Westheimer are unhappy to announce the passing of their mom, the internationally-celebrated intercourse therapist, writer, speak present host, professor, and orphan of the Holocaust,” her household mentioned in an announcement Saturday.

The household will maintain a personal funeral, Lehu mentioned.

As a 50-something psychiatrist, she discovered sudden fame on radio, tv and in bookstores in the course of the Nineteen Eighties, fueled by a easy formulation: Speaking truthfully in public about intimate topics that few others dared to utter even in personal.

“I knew that there’s a lot of data that’s round however doesn’t get to younger folks,” Westheimer informed NBC Nightly Information in 2019. “There’s a delusion (for instance) that girls don’t want intercourse. Nonsense. In fact, they want intercourse.”

Her cheerful public persona as a celeb intercourse therapist belied a painful path to reach at superstardom. Born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928 in Frankfurt, Germany, Westheimer was an solely youngster in a rich Orthodox Jewish household. Her father, Julius, was a profitable businessman who married her mom, Irma, a helper within the family, after getting her pregnant. By Westheimer’s account, it was an idyllic and guarded early childhood.

That might change abruptly with the rise of Hitler and his antisemitic pogroms.

On Nov. 9, 1938, the violence towards Jews escalated with Kristallnacht, a rampage throughout the Jewish neighborhoods of Germany after the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris. The synagogue the place the Siegels worshipped was among the many temples burned to the bottom. Per week later, the hazard hit even nearer to residence. Nazi troopers got here to remove Julius Siegel to a labor camp.

“They took my father downstairs and earlier than he went into the truck he rotated and smiled and waved although he should have been horrified,” she recalled within the documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth.”

Fearful about their solely daughter, the Siegels managed to safe a coveted spot on a kindertransport, a program sending a choose group of Jewish youngsters to the security of a youngsters’s residence and orphanage within the Swiss village of Heiden. The plan was to guard Karola till the entire household may to migrate to Palestine or america collectively. As an alternative, the 10-year-old’s farewell to her mom and paternal grandmother on the prepare station would mark the final time she would see her household alive.

“My dad and mom truly gave me life twice, as soon as after I was born and as soon as after I was despatched to Switzerland,” Westheimer later informed NBC Nightly Information.

Life on the orphanage was arduous: Dr. Ruth wrote in her memoir that the German Jews have been compelled to do the family chores and handle the Swiss youngsters. It acquired even more durable when letters from her household stopped arriving in September 1941, just a few months after Westheimer’s thirteenth birthday. She would later uncover that’s after they have been despatched to Auschwitz, the place they’d be murdered. 

As soon as she turned 18, she was not eligible to remain on the group residence, so she emigrated to Palestine with a number of different friends from the orphanage, settling in a kibbutz. Warned that fellow Jews would distrust somebody from Germany, she ditched her first identify, opting to make use of her center one.

“Ruth” was conscripted to be a sniper for the Jewish underground when struggle broke out after Israel declared its independence in Might 1948. 

“I used to be lucky. I by no means killed anyone, however I may have if I wanted to,” Westheimer informed NBC’s “TODAY” present in 2015.  

Another person, nonetheless, virtually killed her.  Simply weeks into the struggle, on her twentieth birthday, Siegel was severely injured in a bomb blast that left her toes severely broken and at risk of amputation. She defied the chances and made a full restoration.

In 1950, Siegel accepted a wedding proposal from an Israeli soldier, David Bar-Heim, and accompanied her new husband to France, the place he was accepted into medical faculty. Benefiting from the chance to review psychology on the Sorbonne faculty in Paris, Ruth gravitated towards the schooling that had lengthy been denied to her. However Bar-Heim longed to return to Israel, so the couple divorced.

Whereas in Paris, she began up a passionate relationship with a Frenchman named Dan Bommer, which resulted in a being pregnant. As was the norm on the time, the pair married for the advantage of their youngster. Receiving a restitution examine from the West German authorities for schooling disrupted by the Holocaust, the couple used the 5,000 marks to to migrate to New York Metropolis. 

Crossing the Atlantic didn’t save her second marriage, and one other divorce left Ruth as a single mom after the delivery of her daughter, Miriam. Working as a housemaid for $1 an hour and educating herself English via romance novels, Westheimer continued her schooling on the New College and graduated with a grasp’s in sociology.

Throughout a ski journey with mates, she met Manfred Westheimer, a 6-foot-tall engineer who would turn into her subsequent husband. The third time would show a allure: The couple remained collectively for practically 40 years, till Fred’s demise from problems of a stroke in 1997. They’d a son, Joel.

Working at Deliberate Parenthood of New York Metropolis in East Harlem within the late 60s, Westheimer educated paraprofessionals to be household planning counselors. Within the course of, she discovered an affinity for relationship counseling. Enrolling within the Academics Faculty at Columbia College, she was 42 when she graduated together with her doctorate. Her thesis used information from her time at Deliberate Parenthood following the contraceptive and abortive historical past of two,000 ladies within the days earlier than Roe v. Wade made abortion authorized.

Realizing there was a void in household and intercourse remedy, Westheimer managed to land a berth working with famous Cornell psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan, who established the primary clinic to deal with sexual operate in america.

When WYNY-FM neighborhood supervisor Betty Elam got here round to the Cornell Medical Heart searching for a volunteer to assist fill radio airtime, Westheimer had established herself as an skilled within the subject. The NBC-owned radio station wanted to fulfill FCC neighborhood broadcast necessities, and Westheimer appeared educated sufficient to subject questions from listeners for a type of exhibits. The consequence can be known as “Sexually Talking.”

“I assumed she had the proper voice to speak about these topics as a result of she sounded grandmotherly and had the proper angle,” Betty Elam Brauner recalled to NBC Information 43 years later. “She may say issues and other people can be shocked, however they wouldn’t be offended by it.

Her station’s higher administration was much less certain than Elam, particularly given the sexually specific nature of the calls and the potential to run afoul of decency legal guidelines within the area. So, they scheduled the pre-taped present for Sunday night time at midnight.

Westheimer was additionally skeptical — no less than at first.

“I didn’t assume I’d do radio, you’ll be able to hear my accent,” Westheimer informed “TODAY” in 2015. “I assumed there ought to be a program as a result of we’ve got the data and radio had the facility of the airwaves.”

Folks did tune in and pay attention. Elam mentioned she knew they’d successful on their palms by the amount of fan mail that poured into 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the place the present was taped. “Sexually Talking” rapidly went from a 15-minute slot to a one-hour present.

“Her heat, frank, and sometimes humorous solutions are delivered in an idiosyncratic accent that invitations however defies mimicry,” is how The New York Occasions described the rising radio star on the time.

By 1983, it boasted 250,000 listeners, based on Biography.com; a 12 months later, the present was syndicated nationally.

Westheimer grew to become a darling of tv, too. She grew to become a daily visitor of Johnny Carson, Arsenio Corridor, David Letterman and Phil Donahue. Westheimer ultimately headlined her personal cable present, “Good Intercourse!,” which ran on Lifetime. The diminutive star even made the soar to the massive display screen, co-starring with Gerard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver within the 1985 French romantic comedy, “One Lady or Two.”

Not everybody, nonetheless, was a fan. Conservatives voiced outrage over the subject material. A neighborhood politician tried unsuccessfully to make a citizen arrest throughout an October 1985 lecture at Oklahoma State College, stopped by faculty officers earlier than he may bodily seize Westheimer, The Oklahoman newspaper reported on the time.

Westheimer used her platform to evangelise empathy and compassion towards the LGBT neighborhood in the course of the early days of the AIDS disaster and is credited with altering mainstream perceptions of the illness and its victims.

“Dr. Ruth took the disgrace out of intercourse, by emphasizing love and pleasure as a substitute, and she or he had that nice giggle,” mentioned Anka Radakovich, who wrote a groundbreaking intercourse column in Particulars Journal. “She influenced a complete new era of girls to pursue the sector.”

Westheimer saved working lengthy after her radio present led to 1990. She authored greater than 60 books, lectured the world over, and continued to look on tv in as diversified packages as “Quantum Leap,” “Melrose Place” and “The Hollywood Squares.”

The 12 months after she turned 90, Westheimer launched a youngsters’s image e-book known as “Crocodile, You’re Stunning.” In November 2023, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Westheimer because the state’s first Ambassador to Loneliness to assist handle the rise in isolation stemming from the Covid pandemic. She continued to present lectures, and in addition by no means stopped delivering solutions when fellow New Yorkers approached her on the road.

“Even when they ask me a query that I’ve answered 25,000 instances, I took it very severely,” Westheimer informed NBC Nightly Information in 2019.

Westheimer is survived by her youngsters, Miriam and Joel, and 4 grandchildren.