Karola Ruth Westheimer (née Siegel; June 4, 1928 – July 12, 2024), better known as Dr. Ruth, was a German and American sex therapist and talk show host.

Westheimer was born in Germany to a Jewish family. As the Nazis came to power, her parents sent the 10-year-old girl to a school in Switzerland for safety while they remained behind because of her elderly grandmother. Both were killed in concentration camps. After World War II, she emigrated to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At tall and 17 years of age, she joined the Haganah, and was trained as a sniper. She hosted several series on the Lifetime Channel and other cable television networks from 1984 to 1993. She became a household name and major cultural figure, appeared on several network TV shows, co-starred in a movie with Gérard Depardieu, appeared on the cover of People, sang on a Tom Chapin album, appeared in several commercials, and hosted Playboy videos. She was the author of 45 books on sex and sexuality.

The one-woman 2013 play Becoming Dr. Ruth, written by Mark St. Germain, is about Westheimer's life, as is the 2019 documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth, directed by Ryan White. She was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and awarded the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Leo Baeck Medal, the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Early life and education

Germany

Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel, on June 4, 1928, in the small village of Wiesenfeld (now part of Karlstadt am Main), in Germany. She was the only child of Orthodox Jews, Irma (née Hanauer), a housekeeper, and Julius Siegel, a notions wholesaler and son of the family for whom Irma worked. From the age of one, she lived in an apartment in Frankfurt with her parents and her paternal grandmother, Selma, who was a widow. She was given an early grounding in Judaism by her father, who took her regularly to the synagogue in the Nordend district of Frankfurt, where they lived. She cried while her father was taken away by Gestapo men who loaded him on a truck, while her grandmother handed the Nazis money, pleading, "Take good care of my son." Ruth, then aged 10, was never hugged again as a child.

She arrived at an orphanage of a Jewish charity in Heiden, Switzerland, as one of 300 Jewish children, some as young as six years of age. By the end of World War II, nearly all of them were orphans, as their parents never made it out of Germany and were murdered by the Nazis.

While at the Swiss orphanage, Westheimer corresponded with her mother and grandmother via letters. Their letters ceased in 1941, There, her father and his mother died in 1942. Before learning about this later in her life, she had believed that her father was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. There is no information about the specific circumstances of her mother's death. In the database at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Westheimer's mother is categorized as verschollen, or "disappeared/murdered". Next, she lived on Moshav Nahalal, and then, she lived on Kibbutz Yagur. Because of her diminutive height of , she was trained as a scout and sniper. Of this experience, she said, "I never killed anybody, but I know how to throw hand grenades and shoot." She became an ace sniper, and learned to assemble a rifle in the dark.

In 1948, on her 20th birthday, Westheimer was seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during a mortar fire attack on Jerusalem during the 1948 Palestine war; the explosion killed two girls who were right next to her. In 2018 she said that she still visited Israel every year, and felt that it was her real home, and the following year said that she was and is a Zionist.

France

In 1950, at the age of 22, Westheimer married and moved to France with her first husband, David Bar-Haim, an Israeli soldier who had been accepted to medical school in Paris. There, she studied psychology under psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), and earned an undergraduate degree despite not having had a high school education Her first marriage ended as Bar-Heim eventually gave up his studies and decided to return to Israel while Westheimer remained in Paris to continue her studies. They divorced in 1955. She worked as a maid, initially for 75 cents an hour and later for one dollar an hour (equal to $ today) to put herself through graduate school.

Westheimer earned an M.A. degree in sociology from The New School in 1959, with the help of a scholarship. She was a single mother, and an organization named Jewish Family Service paid for her then-three-year-old daughter to stay with a foster family during the day and go to a German Jewish Orthodox nursery school while Westheimer worked and went to classes at The New School. In 1970, at 42 years old, she received a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree in Family-Life Studies from Teachers College, Columbia University with the help of a scholarship, studying under Shirley Zussman. She then trained as a sex therapist at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center/Cornell Medical School, working for seven years under sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan, two years training under her and five years training others.

In 1965, Westheimer became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1961, she married for the third time

Early career

After receiving her doctorate, Westheimer briefly worked for Planned Parenthood in Harlem training women to teach sex education, and this experience encouraged her to continue studying human sexuality. She treated sex therapy patients in a private practice, on East 73rd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She stressed that: "anything that two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom or kitchen floor is all right with me". Asked a question as to having bestialitysex with an animal, she responded: "I'm not a veterinarian." She spoke out against engaging in any sexual activity under pressure. She was against the use of drugs, and said she could not deal with sadomasochism and pedophilia. Journalist Joyce Wadler described her as a "world class charmer".

One journalist described her voice as "a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse". She was noted for having "an accent only a psychologist could love", one that was "dripping chicken soup."

In 1984 The New York Times noted that on radio the 55-year-old had risen "from obscurity to almost instant stardom." Journalist Jeannette Catsoulis wrote later in The New York Times, "It's hard to explain how revolutionary her humor, candor and sexual explicitness seemed for the time."

1980–1989

Westheimer's media career began in 1980 when she was 52 years old, and her radio show, Sexually Speaking, debuted on WYNY-FM in New York City. In it, she answered questions called in by listeners, and the show became nationally syndicated. She was offered the opportunity after she gave a lecture to New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming to help deal with issues of contraception and unwanted pregnancies. Betty Elam, the community affairs manager at WYNY, was impressed with her talk and offered Westheimer $25 per week to make Sexually Speaking, which started as a 15-minute show airing every Sunday at midnight, which was historically a dead time.

By 1981, as the show attracted 250,000 listeners every week despite the network not doing any promotion for it—growing simply by word of mouth—it was extended to be one hour long on Sunday nights, starting at 10 pm. The New York Times described it as one of the station's "oddest shows", and among its biggest draws.

By 1982, her show was WYNY's top-rated phone-in talk show. Singer Pattie Brooks recorded a song as an ode to her, "Dr. Ruth," with a trendy, dance-rock tinged, high pressure beat.

By 1983 her show was the top-rated radio show in the country's largest radio market. In 1984 NBC Radio began syndicating the radio program nationwide—it was now heard in 93 markets.

In 1984, Westheimer began hosting several television programs on the Lifetime TV network, and one in syndication. Her first show was Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer, airing for a half hour at 10 pm on weeknights. She ended each show by reminding her audience: "Have good sex!"

The show was expanded in 1985 to a full hour, and its name was changed to The Dr. Ruth Show. During each of her live shows, 3,000 callers tried to get through, and the show attracted an average of 450,000 viewers a night, double the audience previously watching at that hour, and attracted more viewers than any other show on Lifetime; that number rose to two million homes a week. In April 1985 she appeared on the cover of People.

Dr. Ruth's Game of Good Sex was released in 1985. A Baltimore distributor said: "I'm going to have to compare this to Trivial Pursuit. The orders overshadow anything we've had in our company's 100-year history."

thumb|upright|Westheimer in 2018

In 1987, she began a separate half-hour syndicated series on many broadcast stations called Ask Dr. Ruth, which was co-hosted by Larry Angelo. Westheimer's friend Eleanor Bergstein, the writer of the 1987 romantic drama dance film Dirty Dancing, attempted to cast her to play Mrs. Schumacher in the film (with Joel Grey as her husband). She backed out when she learned the character is a thief. That year she also appeared in an episode of the television series Tall Tales & Legends as the "Mysterious Stranger."

During the 1980s, "Dr. Ruth" became a household name and a major cultural figure; during the 1980s and 1990s, she made frequent guest appearances on several network television shows, including Late Night with David Letterman, and appeared on talk shows on German television. She was portrayed on Saturday Night Live by Mary Gross in "Saturday Night News" four times in 1983, and twice in 1984; was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson twice in 1982, once in 1983, three times in 1984, twice in 1985 – in addition to being impersonated in a "Mighty Carson Art Players" sketch, and once in 1986; on Joan Rivers: Can We Talk? twice in 1986; seven times as a panelist on the game show The New Hollywood Squares in 1986–87; on The Arsenio Hall Show once in 1989; on The Joan Rivers Show once in 1989; and on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee in both 1989 and 1990. In 1987, she made a TV commercial for Signal mouthwash.

1990–1999

thumb|upright|left|Westheimer in 1995

In 1990, Westheimer starred in an ABC sitcom pilot, Dr. Ruth's House, which aired as a one-time special in June of that year. ABC did not move forward in turning the pilot into a series.

In 1993, Westheimer and Israeli TV host Arad Nir hosted a talk show in Hebrew titled Min Tochnit, on the newly opened Israeli Channel 2. The show was similar to her U.S. Sexually Speaking show. The name of the show, Min Tochnit, is a play on words: literally "Kind of a program", but "Min" (מין) in Hebrew also means "sex" and "gender". 1993 and 1994 saw the publication of "Dr. Ruth's Good Sex Night-to-Night Calendar."

In 1994, she appeared in a computer game, an interactive CD-ROM adaptation of Dr. Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex released for Windows and a Philips CD-i.

In 1995, she hosted a series of Playboy instructional videos entitled "Making Love". She also wrote a column distributed both nationally and internationally by the King Features Syndicate. She appeared on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs in 1990; on The Arsenio Hall Show once in 1990, once in 1991, once in 1993, and once in 1994; on The Howard Stern Show once in 1991; on Late Night with Conan O'Brien once in 1994, twice in 1995, three times in 1996, and once in 1997; on The Daily Show once in 1998; and was featured in a Celebrity Deathmatch episode in 1999.

Westheimer also appeared in several commercial advertisements, including a 1998 commercial for Clairol Herbal Essences shampoo and body wash, a 1991 Pepsi commercial (along with Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Bo Jackson, and Gilbert Gottfried), and a 1994 Honda Prelude ad.

2000–2009

thumb|Ruth Westheimer in 2009

In 2000, she appeared on Grammy Award winner Tom Chapin's album This Pretty Planet, in the song "Two Kinds of Seagulls", in which she and Chapin sing in a duet of various animals that reproduce sexually. "It takes two to tingle" says the song. That year, she also made a TV commercial for Entenmann's Raspberry Danish Twist.

Between 2001 and 2007, Westheimer made regular appearances on the PBS children's television series Between the Lions as "Dr. Ruth Wordheimer" in a spoof of her therapist role, in which she helps anxious readers and spellers overcome their fear of long words. In 2002, she received a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, for Timeless Tales and Music of Our Time. In 2003–04, she made 10 appearances as a panelist on the game show Hollywood Squares.

In 2004, she made a guest appearance on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, an NPR news panel game, and in 2007 she appeared on Live with Regis and Kelly. In January 2009, the 55th anniversary issue of Playboy magazine included Westheimer as #13 in a list of the 55 most important people in sex from the past 55 years. That year, Vanity Fair named her one of "12 women who changed the way we look at sex."

2010–2024

In 2011, interior designer Nate Berkus hosted her on The Nate Berkus Show, after redoing the living room and dining room of her Manhattan apartment, in which she had lived for 50 years, to reduce clutter. She appeared as a guest on The Doctors in 2011 and 2012, on Joy Behar: Say Anything! in 2012, on Rachael Ray in 2013 and 2015, and on The Today Show in 2015 and 2019.

In 2018, she wrote three books. In 2019, she was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers, The View, The Today Show, and twice on Strahan, Sara and Keke. She also had over 100,000 followers on Twitter. She was also the Executive Producer for PBS documentaries Surviving Salvation and No Missing Link, Shifting Sands: Bedouin Women at the Crossroads, and The Unknown Face of Islam (on the Circassians). Actress Debra Jo Rupp played the role of Dr. Ruth. Eileen DeSandre played Dr. Ruth in the Virginia Repertory Theatre production of Becoming Dr. Ruth. In 2021, actress Tovah Feldshuh played Dr. Ruth.

In 2019, the documentary Ask Dr. Ruth directed by Ryan White was in theaters, and was made available on Hulu, as she approached her 90th birthday. it won a 4th Critics' Choice Documentary Award in 2019 as "Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary," and was a 19th AARP Movies for Grownups Awards nominee in 2019 for "Best Documentary." Having previously avoided discussing her early years and how the Holocaust affected her family and herself, Westheimer believed that current events made it necessary for her to "stand up and be counted". She said that seeing child refugees being separated from their parents upset her, because her own story was reflected in what they were going through.

Accolades

thumb|upright|Westheimer in 2008

Some time before 1983, Westheimer was made a non-physician Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.

In 2008, Westheimer's name was added to the Bronx Walk of Fame (as the first "Honorary Bronxite," chosen for contributions to the life of the borough). In 2010 she was made a member of the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. In 2017 she was inducted into the German-American Hall of Fame. In 2019, she was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. In 2002, she received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, as well as the Leo Baeck Medal for her humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice, in 2006 the Columbia University Teacher's College Medal For Distinguished Services, in 2012 the National Alliance on Mental Illness Yale Mental Health Research Advocacy Award, in 2013 the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award, and in 2019 the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award. The Library of Congress acquired her papers in 2022.

In 2000 Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College, in 2001 an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Lehman College, in 2008 an honorary doctorate from Westfield State University, in 2014 an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Trinity College in Connecticut, and in 2019 an honorary doctorate from Ben Gurion University of the Negev (she remarked: "I wish I had met Ben Gurion. He was short.").

In 2023, Westheimer received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Psychology Pioneer Award from the United Nations.

Personal life and death

Westheimer was married three times, the first time to Israeli soldier and medical student David Bar-Heim for five years, and the second time briefly to Dan Bommer, with whom she had her daughter, Miriam, who later took the last name of her stepfather. When Diane Sawyer, interviewing the couple for the TV show 60 Minutes asked her husband about their sex life, he answered, "The shoemaker's children have no shoes." and who lived in Israel for six years and later married Joel Henry Einleger, and Joel Westheimer, a professor at the University of Ottawa; she had four grandchildren. She said: "I was so short – 4 feet 7 inches – that I couldn't believe that anything could grow inside of me."

Westheimer spoke English, German, French, and Hebrew.

In December 2014, Westheimer was a guest at a wedding in the Bronx. The groom, Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt, was the great-grandson of the woman who had helped rescue Westheimer from Nazi Germany.

Among her concerns in the 21st century was loneliness of people.

In her final years, Westheimer lived in the cluttered three-bedroom apartment on 190th Street "in Washington Heights where she raised her two children and became famous, in that order". She stayed there, she said in 1995, to be near the two synagogues of which she was a member (one of which is the Reform synagogue the Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation of Washington Heights, and the other of which is Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale; she was also a member of the Orthodox synagogue Ohav Shalom until it closed), the YMHA of Washington Heights and Inwood of which she was president for 11 years, and a "still sizable community of German Jewish World War II refugees". She explained: "Because of my experience with the Holocaust, I don't like to lose friends."

Publications

Filmography

  • Electric Dreams (1984); science fiction romantic comedy; cast as herself as talk show host
  • Une Femme ou Deux (One Woman or Two) (1985); comedy romance starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver; cast as Mrs. Heffner
  • Forever, Lulu (1987); comedy mystery starring Hanna Schygulla, Deborah Harry, and Alec Baldwin; cast as herself
  • Quantum Leap (TV, 1993) "Dr. Ruth" (episode 87); science fiction; cast as herself
  • The Emperor's New Clothes: An All-Star Illustrated Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale (1998); cast as the Imperial Physician (voice)
  • The History of Sex (1999); documentary, interviews
  • Between the Lions (2000); children's program; cast as Dr. Ruth Wordheimer
  • Inside Deep Throat (2005); documentary about the pornographic film Deep Throat, and its effects on American society; as herself
  • Lipshitz Saves the World (2007); comedy starring Leslie Nielsen; cast as herself
  • Ask Dr. Ruth (2019; Sundance Film Festival); documentary directed by Ryan White follows Westheimer as she reflects on her life and career

References

  • Dr. Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex
  • Introduction to Sexually Speaking Radio Show
  • "Arsenio Hall and Dr. Ruth visit Condomania," December 22, 2006 (video)
  • "At Home With Dr. Ruth," November 29, 2013, The New York Times (video)
  • "Oral history interview" with Dr. Ruth by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 14, 2010 (audio)