Dr. Ruth Westheimer (96), tiny in stature, but giant in her work and importance, a sex therapist, who became a pop icon, media star, and bestseller author through honest conversations about formerly taboo topics in the bedroom, has died.
Westheimer died Friday at her home in New York, surrounded by family, her publicist and friend Pierre Lehu said.
Westheimer never recommended risky sexual behavior, but instead encouraged open dialogue about previously "forbidden" issues that affected her audience of millions in the US and around the world. Her one recurring theme was that there was nothing to be ashamed of.
"I still hold to old-fashioned values and I'm a little square-minded," she told students at Michigan City High School in 2002. "Sex is a private skill and a private matter. But still, it's a topic we have to talk about," she underscored.
Her high-pitched voice with a German accent, along with her height of 39 cm, made her an unlikely but very striking answer to the need for "sexual literacy". The contradiction of her appearance and the topics she talked about was one of the keys to her success.
But her extensive knowledge and training, along with her humorous, warm, non-judgmental manner, catapulted her local radio program "Sexually Speaking" into the US spotlight in the early 1980s. She had an open mind, not judging what two adults were doing in the privacy of their own home.
"Tell him you're not going to initiate sex," she told a concerned phone caller in June 1982, and to another, "Tell him Dr. Westheimer said she won't die without 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," demystifying sex with rationality and humor. There was even a board game called "Dr Ruth's Game of Good Sex".
She soon became a regular guest on late night television shows, breaking out onto the US national stage. Its rise coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank sexual conversation became necessary.
"If we could start a conversation about sexual activity the way we talk about food, without it causing the perception that there's something wrong with it, we'd take it a step further. We have to do it, but in good taste," she said. Johnny Carson in 1982.
She normalized the use of the words "penis" and "vagina" on radio and television, using her Jewish accent to speak like everyone's grandmother, which the Wall Street Journal once described as "a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse."
"People" magazine included her in its list of "Most Intriguing People of the Century". It even made it into Shania Twain's song: "No, I don't need proof to show me the truth/Even Dr. Ruth won't tell me how I feel."
Westheimer defended the right to abortion, recommended sex after a good night's sleep to older people, and was an outspoken advocate of condom use. She believed in monogamy.
In the 1980s, she advocated for gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic and was vocal in support of the LGBTQ community. She said she defended people who some far-right Christians consider "subhuman" because she stood up for them with her past.
Born Karola Ruth Seigel in Frankfurt, Germany in 1928, she was an only child. At the age of 10, her parents sent her to Switzerland to escape the "Kristallnacht" - the Nazi pogrom of 1938 that served as a precursor to the Holocaust. She never saw her parents again. Westheimer believed they were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
At the age of 16, she moved to Palestine and joined the Haganah, an underground movement for the independence of Israel. She was trained as a sniper, although she said she never shot at anyone.
She was seriously wounded in the legs when a bomb exploded in her dormitory in Israel, killing many of her friends. She said that it was only with the work of a great 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 studied. Although he did not finish 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 went to New York with her new partner, 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, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany. They got married and had a son, Joel. They remained married for 36 years, until "Fred," as she called him, died of heart failure in 1997.
After earning 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 sexuality education. It will eventually become the core of her curriculum.
"I soon realized that although I knew enough about education, I didn't know enough about sex," she wrote in her 1987 autobiography, and decided to take classes with renowned sex therapist, Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan.
That's how she discovered her calling. Before long, as she once said in her usual easy-to-understand commentary, she was dishing out sexual advice "like a recipe for good chicken soup."
"I came from an orthodox Jewish home, and we Jews never considered sex a sin," she told the Guardian in 2019.
In 1984, her radio program gained national prominence in the US. A year later, she made her television debut on "The Dr. Ruth Show," which won an Ace Award for Excellence in Cable Television.
She wrote a nationally syndicated advice column and was later featured in a series of videos produced by Playboy, preaching the virtues of open sex and good sex.
Her rise was noteworthy for the culture of the time, in which then-President Ronald Reagan's administration was hostile to Planned Parenthood and aligned with pro-conservative voices.
Phyllis Schlafly, a staunch anti-feminist, wrote in the 1999 book "The Dangers of Sex Education" that Westheimer, as well as Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres and others, promote "provocative sex talk" and "rampant immorality."
Father Edwin O'Brien, director of communications for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, who would later become a cardinal, called her work disturbing and morally compromised.
"It's pure hedonism," O'Brien wrote in a 1982 opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal. "The message is just let yourself go; whatever feels good is good. There is no higher law of overriding morality, and there is also no responsibility," he said.
Westheimer appeared in a long series of TV shows and even played herself in episodes of some TV series.
Her books include "Sex for Dolls", her works "Everything in Life" (1987) and "Speaking Musically: Life in Song" (2003). The documentary "Ask Dr. Ruth" was broadcast in 2019.
As a radio and television personality, she remained committed to teaching, with positions at Yale, Hunter, Princeton and Columbia universities and a busy schedule of teaching students. In addition, she maintained a private practice throughout her life.
Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew Union College Institute of Religion for her work on human sexuality and dedication to the Jewish people, Israel and religion. In 2001, she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Leo Beck Medal, and in 2004 she was awarded a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Trinity College.
Ryan White, director of "Ask Dr. Ruth," told Vice in 2019 that Westheimer never followed trends. She has always been an ally of gay rights and an advocate of family planning.
"She was at the forefront of both of those things her whole life. I met friends of hers from the orphanage she was in, who said that even when she met gay people in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, she always accepted and always said that people should be treated with respect".
She is survived by two children, Joel and Miriam, and four grandchildren.
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