Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly psychologist who, as “Dr. Ruth,” became America’s best-known sex counselor thanks to her frank and funny radio and television programs, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
His death was announced by a spokesperson, Pierre Lehu.
Dr. Westheimer was in her fifties when she made her on-air debut in 1980, answering listeners’ questions about sex and relationships on New York radio station WYNY. The show, called “Sexually Speaking,” was only 15 minutes long and aired after midnight on Sundays. But it was so successful that she quickly became a national media celebrity and a one-man business conglomerate.
At the height of her popularity in the 1980s, she hosted radio and television shows, wrote a column for Playgirl magazine, lent her name to a board game and its computer version, and began publishing sex guides covering everything from educating the young to rehabilitating the elderly. Students loved her; her campus appearances alone brought her substantial income. She appeared in commercials for cars, soft drinks, shampoo, typewriters, and condoms.
She even landed a role in the 1985 French film “Une femme ou deux,” starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver, which was released in the United States in 1987. “Dr. Ruth will never be mistaken for an actress,” wrote Janet Maslin in her New York Times review, “but she has pep.”
Today, perhaps, it is worth remembering that Ruth Westheimer had a radical formula and a considerable influence on social mores. Talk shows abounded in the 1980s, but before her arrival, none had dealt with sex in such an exclusive and clinical manner. No one could have predicted that the messenger of Eros would be a 4-foot-6 middle-aged schoolteacher whose delivery of speech was described by the Wall Street Journal as “a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.”
A sex talk show? “Why not?” Dr. Westheimer asked. “Why not share some recipes on the air. I’m promoting sex education in an era of unprecedented sexual freedom.”
Of course, his recipes were not limited to what one might hear in a Sunday sermon.
Columnist William E. Geist, who visited her in the studio for a New York Times Magazine article in 1985, wrote: “She looks as if she were about to explain to us, in her cheerful Central European accent, how to make a good apple strudel.”
“But when she opens her mouth, it’s code blue in family rooms across the country,” he added. “She’s sending out on radio and television the most explicit instructions on sexual manipulation, stimulation and gratification.”
In response to a question posed that day, she cautioned, “Don’t let her do that while you’re driving!” But whether the topic was how to restore romance to a marriage or something a little more niche (for example, isn’t there a legitimate reason to have peanut butter in the bedroom?), she tried to emphasize respectful relationships and safety, not just the mechanics of intimacy.
As Dr. Westheimer put it, her story was unique in America, that of someone who had come to this country “with nothing.” She had, however, a degree from the Sorbonne and a determination forged during difficult times as a Holocaust orphan, a refugee and a fighter in Israel’s war for independence. She had joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, and trained as a sniper. Although she never shot anyone, her legs were badly injured by a shell explosion in 1948.
By the time she arrived in New York in 1956, she had already experienced two failed marriages. She had married an Israeli, “the first man who asked me to marry him,” she said. They had moved to Paris, where their marriage had collapsed under the stress of her husband training to become a doctor while she was studying psychology. She had married her second husband, a Frenchman, to legalize a pregnancy. Although he came to live with her in New York and they had a daughter, she found their relationship unsatisfactory. “Intellectually, it just wasn’t sustainable,” she told People magazine in 1985.
Her life as a single mother consisted of raising her children and years of night classes in English and vocational studies. At first, she took any job she could get, including working as a housekeeper for a dollar an hour. But after earning a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1959, she was hired as a research assistant at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.
In 1967, she was appointed project director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem and continued her studies at night until she received her doctorate in education from Columbia in 1970. She then did postdoctoral studies in human sexuality at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where she trained with Helen Singer Kaplan, the pioneer of sexology. She later taught at Lehman College in the Bronx and at Brooklyn College.
It was in New York that she found her soul mate: Manfred Westheimer, a telecommunications engineer she met in 1961 while skiing in the Catskills. He was, like her, a German Jewish refugee and, at 5’5″, he was only a head taller than her. Their marriage lasted until Westheimer’s death in 1997.
Dr. Westheimer is survived by her son, Joel Westheimer, her daughter, Miriam Westheimer, and four grandchildren.
Many years after her husband’s death, Dr. Westheimer paid a glowing tribute to their love affair: “Skiers are the best lovers because they don’t sit around watching TV like slackers,” she told Esquire magazine. “They take risks and they sway their hips. They also meet new people on the ski lifts.”
Ruth Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928. She was the only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple, Julius and Irma (Hanauer) Siegel. Her father was a wholesale dry goods dealer in Frankfurt, and with her parents and grandmother, she lived a comfortable life, largely shielded from the reality that Germany was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews.
When the Nazis took her father away in 1938, her mother and grandmother managed to get her into a group of children sent to a school in the Swiss mountains. There, she later recalled, she was educated only through eighth grade and served as a housekeeper for the Swiss children. She never saw her family again; they were all presumed murdered at Auschwitz. After the war, still a teenager, she left for what was then Palestine.
Here’s how she became Dr. Ruth: Betty Elam, WYNY’s community affairs manager, had heard Dr. Westheimer give a talk on sex education to a group of broadcasters, and she came up with the original “Sexually Speaking” program in 1980. It paid just $25 a week, but it was like a winning lottery ticket. Before long, Dr. Ruth had established her brand, with businesses in broadcasting, advertising, book publishing and other fields.
She was not without her critics. Some mental health professionals worried that she was mass marketing sex therapy and turning neurosis into entertainment. She also came under fire from some clergymen, including the Rev. Edwin O’Brien, a former secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York. “The message is to please yourself; whatever feels good is good,” he wrote in a 1982 Wall Street Journal article. “There is no higher law that supersedes morality, and there is no accountability.”
But for the most part, she was given a reprieve from saying things on air that would have been shocking coming from anyone else. In August 1984, when the Lifetime cable network launched “Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer” as a Monday-through-Friday program, she said humor was an important part of her approach: “If a teacher makes his students laugh, they will go away remembering what they learned.”
Overexposure and competition tarnished Dr. Westheimer’s popularity after the 1980s, but she continued to lecture, make television appearances, and practice sex therapy privately for many years. In 2019, she was the subject of a documentary directed by Ryan White, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” which chronicled her journey to becoming a famous sex therapist.
In November 2023, Dr. Westheimer was named New York State’s first “Honorary Ambassador for Loneliness” by Governor Kathy Hochul. In the role, which she herself nominated, Dr. Westheimer would “help New Yorkers of all ages address the growing problem of social isolation, which is associated with multiple physical and mental health issues,” the governor said in a statement.
“I don’t want to be known just as a sexologist,” Dr. Westheimer said at the time. “I want to be known as a therapist.”
Above all, she has published books—more than twenty, on her own, on sexuality, often with her longtime collaborator Mr. Lehu—and others, including a memoir, “Musically Speaking: A Life Through Song” (2003), in which she describes in detail the band concerts, folk tunes and popular songs she knew as a happy child in Frankfurt.
Although she was deaf and not a music lover, she said, she realized quite late in life that these vivid memories probably replaced the family history she would have heard had her family life not ended abruptly when she was 10. “The melodies and lyrics of the songs I knew provide a link to the past forever,” she writes.
And those memories helped explain how she could have “such a zest for life in the face of the losses and upheavals I had to endure in the early years of my life.” When people wondered about her exuberance, she said, “the answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood socialization had a remarkable power and influence.”
“But now I realize there is another part of the answer: music.”