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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 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. On her 20th birthday, she was wounded in action by an exploding shell during mortar fire on Jerusalem during the 1947–1949 Palestine War, and almost lost both feet.
Two years later, Westheimer moved to Paris, France, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne. Immigrating to the United States in 1956, she worked as a maid to put herself through graduate school, earned a Master of Arts in sociology from The New School in 1959, and earned a doctorate at age 42 from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1970. Over the next decade, she taught at a number of universities and had a private sex therapy practice.
Westheimer's media career began in 1980 with the radio call-in show Sexually Speaking, which continued until 1990. In 1983 it was the top-rated radio show in the country's largest radio market. She then launched a television show, The Dr. Ruth Show, which by 1985 attracted two million viewers a week. She became known for giving serious advice while being candid, but also warm, cheerful, funny, and respectful, and for her tag phrase: "Get some". In 1984 The New York Times noted that she had risen "from obscurity to almost instant stardom." 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.
Her father, 38 years old at the time, was taken away by the , who sent him to the Dachau concentration camp a week after Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass", when Nazis burned down 10,000 Jewish stores as well as Jewish homes and synagogues, in November 1938. 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."
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. In the orphanage she was given cleaning responsibilities and took on the role of a caregiver and mother-like figure to the younger children. She remained at the orphanage for six years. Girls at the orphanage were not allowed to take classes at the local school. However, a boy at the school secretly loaned her his textbooks at night so she could read them in secret and continue her education.
While at the Swiss orphanage, Westheimer corresponded with her mother and grandmother via letters. Their letters ceased in 1941, when her parents and her paternal grandmother were deported to Łódź Ghetto on 20 October 1941.Arolsen Archives: Deportation from Frankfurt/Main to Lodz, 1941/10/20, Reference Code
: accessed 21 August 2024) 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". In addition to Westheimer's parents, all of her other relatives lost their lives during the Holocaust.
For many years, she lived with an "irrational guilt"; she thought that if she had stayed in Germany, she could have saved her parents. Later, she said the guilt had been replaced by an admiration for her parents' sacrifice in sending her to safety, saying: "I would not have the courage to send my own children away like that."
Westheimer joined the Haganah Jewish Zionist underground paramilitary organization (later, the Israel Defense Forces) in Jerusalem. Because of her diminutive height of , she was trained as a Reconnaissance 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. When she was 90 years old, she demonstrated that she was still able to put together a Sten gun with her eyes closed.
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. Temporarily paralyzed and with two injured feet (one missing a top portion), she spent months in a recuperative ward before walking again.[5] , TC Today. 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.
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.Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Dr. Steven Kaplan (2020). Grandparenthood 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 She regained her German citizenship in 2007 through the German Citizenship Project that enabled descendants of Germans deprived of their citizenship during Nazi Germany to reclaim their citizenship without losing the citizenship of their home country.
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."
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. It was soon picked up by 90 stations across the United States, and it ran for a decade. The show broke taboos of the time against speaking publicly and explicitly about sex. The New York Times described it as one of the station's "oddest shows", and among its biggest draws. A New York University professor of human sexuality made listening to her show a class assignment. When the station offered a "Dr. Ruth T-shirt" ("Sex on Sunday? You Bet!"), it received 3,500 orders.
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.James Arena (2013). First Ladies of Disco; 32 Stars Discuss the Era and Their Singing Careers [13] , Cashbox.
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. She went on to produce her radio show until 1990.
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 magazine. That year she also appeared as an actress in the French romantic comedy film Une Femme ou Deux ( One Woman or Two), starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver, playing the part of a wealthy philanthropist.
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." Dr. Ruth's Computer Game of Good Sex was a hit, released in 1986 for the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Apple II.
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.
She appeared on a TV Guide cover in 1988. Dr. Ruth returned to the Lifetime network in 1988 with The All New Dr. Ruth Show. That was followed in 1989 by two teen advice shows called What's Up, Dr. Ruth?, and a call-in show, You're on the Air with Dr. Ruth in 1990. 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 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.
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. In 1996, she co-authored Heavenly Sex, on Judaism and sex, in which she wrote: "The great rabbi Simeon ben-Halafta called the penis the great peacemaker of the home." She referred to the Book of Ruth as encouraging single women to initiate sex (providing the relationship leads to marriage), cited a mandate that an unemployed man must make love to his wife every day, and mentioned the writings of a 12th-century rabbi who suggested that couples use different positions while having sex.
In 1992, she was a guest star on the television soap opera One Life to Live. She appeared as herself in "Dr. Ruth", a 1993 episode of the sci-fi drama series Quantum Leap. 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.
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 . 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." She also appeared in the 2009 documentary .
In 2018, she wrote three books. In 2019, she published her 45th book on sex and sexuality. On her 91st birthday, June 4, 2019, Westheimer appeared as a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she visited Ellen's show again in November 2019, taking questions from the audience, and was also a guest in November 2020.Archived at Ghostarchive and the
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Speaking of the Holocaust in 2021, Westheimer said: "We must keep saying to the young people, 'Think of these words — never again! Never again!' All of this must never happen again."
Westheimer was an accomplished ethnographer. Her studies in this field included the Ethiopian Jews, Papua New Guinea's Trobriand people, and the Druze, a sect originating from Shia Islam now residing in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon. The latter were the subjects of her 2007 PBS documentary The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strength of the Druze, and a book of the same title. 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).
Westheimer was a board member of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan in New York City.
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.
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.
Westheimer was named 1983 Jewish Woman of Achievement by a consortium of organizations connected with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York, received the 1986 Mayor's Liberty Award from New York City Mayor Ed Koch, and was given the 1987 Motion Picture Theater Bookers Association Star of Tomorrow Award. Her show The All New Dr. Ruth Show won a 1988 Ace Award, and was awarded the 1994 Magnus Hirschfeld Medal and the 1995 American Academy of Clinical Sexology Medal of Sexology. 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."). "'Dr. Ruth' Returns to Lehman College to Speak at June 6 Commencement and Receive Honorary Doctorate," The Bronx Journal, May–June 2001.
In 2023, Westheimer received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Psychology Pioneer Award from the United Nations.
She had two children: Dr. Miriam Yael Westheimer, an educator, author, and chief program officer of HIPPY International, which develops early childhood education and literacy programs, 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 language.
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 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York appointed Westheimer as the inaugural "Loneliness Ambassador".
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 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 Judaism 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."
Westheimer died at her home in Manhattan on July 12, 2024, at the age of 96.
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