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

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust orphan who rose to develop into one of the well-known intercourse therapists in America, a 4-foot-7 celeb with a giant 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, in accordance with 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, creator, discuss 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 throughout the Eighties, fueled by a easy system: 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 individuals,” Westheimer advised NBC Nightly Information in 2019. “There’s a fable (for instance) that ladies don’t want intercourse. Nonsense. After all, 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 baby 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. Every 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 circled and smiled and waved even if he should have been horrified,” she recalled within the documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth.”

Frightened about their solely daughter, the Siegels managed to safe a coveted spot on a kindertransport, a program sending a choose group of Jewish kids to the security of a kids’s residence and orphanage within the Swiss village of Heiden. The plan was to guard Karola till the entire household might to migrate to Palestine or america collectively. As a substitute, 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 mother and father really gave me life twice, as soon as after I was born and as soon as after I was despatched to Switzerland,” Westheimer later advised 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 deal with the Swiss kids. It obtained even more durable when letters from her household stopped arriving in September 1941, a couple of months after Westheimer’s thirteenth birthday. She would later uncover that’s after they have been despatched to Auschwitz, the place they might 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 title, opting to make use of her center one.

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

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

Another person, nonetheless, virtually killed her.  Simply weeks into the conflict, on her twentieth birthday, Siegel was severely injured in a bomb blast that left her ft severely broken and in peril 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. Making the most of the chance to check psychology on the Sorbonne faculty in Paris, Ruth gravitated towards the training 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 baby. Receiving a restitution test from the West German authorities for training 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 start of her daughter, Miriam. Working as a housemaid for $1 an hour and instructing herself English by way of romance novels, Westheimer continued her training on the New Faculty and graduated with a grasp’s in sociology.

Throughout a ski journey with pals, she met Manfred Westheimer, a 6-foot-tall engineer who would develop into her subsequent husband. The third time would show a allure: The couple remained collectively for practically 40 years, till Fred’s loss of life 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 skilled paraprofessionals to be household planning counselors. Within the course of, she discovered an affinity for relationship counseling. Enrolling within the Lecturers Faculty at Columbia College, she was 42 when she graduated together with her doctorate. Her thesis used knowledge from her time at Deliberate Parenthood following the contraceptive and abortive historical past of two,000 girls 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 Middle in search of a volunteer to assist fill radio airtime, Westheimer had established herself as an professional within the discipline. The NBC-owned radio station wanted to fulfill FCC neighborhood broadcast necessities, and Westheimer appeared educated sufficient to discipline questions from listeners for a type of reveals. The consequence can be referred to as “Sexually Talking.”

“I believed she had the right voice to speak about these topics as a result of she sounded grandmotherly and had the right angle,” Betty Elam Brauner recalled to NBC Information 43 years later. “She might 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 — at the least at first.

“I didn’t suppose I’d do radio, you may hear my accent,” Westheimer advised “TODAY” in 2015. “I believed there ought to be a program as a result of we’ve the data and radio had the facility of the airwaves.”

Folks did tune in and hear. Elam mentioned she knew that they had successful on their fingers by the amount of fan mail that poured into 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the place the present was taped. “Sexually Talking” shortly 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 Instances described the rising radio star on the time.

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

Westheimer turned a darling of tv, too. She turned an everyday 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 leap to the massive display, co-starring with Gerard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver within the 1985 French romantic comedy, “One Girl or Two.”

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

Westheimer used her platform to evangelise empathy and compassion towards the LGBT neighborhood throughout 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 an alternative, and she or he had that nice giggle,” mentioned Anka Radakovich, who wrote a groundbreaking intercourse column in Particulars Journal. “She influenced an entire new era of ladies to pursue the sphere.”

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

The 12 months after she turned 90, Westheimer launched a kids’s image guide referred to as “Crocodile, You’re Lovely.” In November 2023, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Westheimer because the state’s first Ambassador to Loneliness to assist tackle the rise in isolation stemming from the Covid pandemic. She continued to offer lectures, and likewise 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 significantly,” Westheimer advised NBC Nightly Information in 2019.

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