Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist whose unequivocal manner and unending charm made her a talk show superstar, has died at age 96.
Westheimer died Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family, according to publicist Pierre Lehu.
Westheimer rose to fame thanks to her willingness to speak frankly about sex when few others would. Her nighttime radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” became so popular in the 1980s that she parlayed it into a Lifetime TV show. At that point, she was famous enough that it was simply called “The Dr. Ruth Show.”
“We don’t have the luxury to not talk about sex,” Westheimer said in a 2018 interview. “Our children get information from the internet, and some of it may be inaccurate. The conversation has to extend beyond the home; it has to be a collaborative effort by schools, parents.”
“The Dr. Ruth Show” ran from 1984 to 1991, but Westheimer remained an authority on sex, appearing on talk shows and granting interviews to spread important information.
She also published dozens of books, ranging from “Sex For Dummies” to “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Talking About Herpes.”
“I may have been on the cover of People and gone on ‘David Letterman’ and ‘Arsenio Hall’ because they had young audiences I wanted to talk to,” Westheimer said in 2016. “But at the same time, I always did serious books or taught seminars. I was very conscious of that.”
But Westheimer was much more than the nation’s leading sex therapist. Born June 4, 1928 in Germany’s Bavaria region, Westheimer was also a Holocaust survivor. When she was 10 years old, her parents put her on a train to an orphanage in Switzerland.
Westheimer survived the war in the neutral country, but her parents were among the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
“If they had not made the sacrifice to send their only child to Switzerland, I wouldn’t be alive,” she said in 2019, adding that her parents gave her life twice: “Once when I was born, and once when they sent me to Switzerland.”
Westheimer later said that she felt “an obligation to make a dent in society” because she survived.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
AP Photo/Susan Ragan
Dr. Ruth Westheimer is shown at a reception to promote her new book “Dr. Ruth’s Guide for Married Lovers”, July 17, 1986.
After the war, she took a train to Marseille and from there a ship to British Mandatory Palestine.
In the Middle East, Westheimer joined the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces. She trained as a sniper, though she said she never killed anyone during the 1947-49 Palestine War.
“I know how to put five bullets in the red circle, but I wouldn’t touch a gun today — not since Columbine,” she said in 2018. “I’ve never killed anybody. I was very badly wounded by a bomb in the Israeli independence war on my 20th birthday. Two girls next to me were killed, and I almost lost my legs.”
Westheimer went from the war back to France in 1950, where she divorced her first husband, married a second time and booked a trip to New York. She never left, earning a master’s in sociology from The New School in 1959 and a doctorate in education from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1970.
A series of teaching gigs turned into a 15-minute radio program on WYNY, which was so successful that Westheimer was later given a two-hour block on Sunday nights. In addition to her openness and straightforward delivery, Westheimer credited her accent for her success.
AP Photo/Nancy Kaye
Sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer chats with rock singer Cyndi Lauper in New York, Jan. 17, 1985.
“When I came to this country, people told me that if I wanted to teach and work here, I would have to take speech lessons to lose my accent,” she said in 2016. “But it helped me greatly, because when people turned on the radio, they knew it was me.”
Westheimer kept even her serious conversations lighthearted, as she always maintained humor was important for driving a message home.
“In the Jewish tradition it says that if you teach with humor, the students will remember what you talked about,” she said in 2023.
Westheimer was ahead of her time in willingness to talk openly about sex, but she was happy that public opinion finally caught up to her — indeed she surely played a key role in shaping it.
“I’m not putting my head in the sand,” she said in 2019. “I’m not someone who doesn’t see problems; we have a lot of problems. But we need to work together to make this world a better place.”
Westheimer is survived by two children, Joel and Miriam, and four grandchildren.