Ruth Westheimer

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 4 feet 7 inches (140 cm) 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.

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.

Her father, 38 years old at the time, was taken away by the Nazis, 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."

Switzerland

Westheimer's mother and grandmother decided that Nazi Germany was too dangerous for her, due to the growing Nazi violence. Therefore, a few weeks later, in January 1939, they sent her on the Kindertransport, an organized Jewish children's rescue train to Switzerland, though she desperately did not want to leave. 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. 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. 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". 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."

Israel

After World War II ended, Westheimer decided to immigrate to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine at 16 years of age. After she immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in September 1945, at the age of 17, she joined Kibbutz Ramat David and worked in agriculture. Told her name was too German, she changed her name from Karola to her middle name, Ruth and went by Ruth K. Siegel, retaining Karola as her middle initial in case her parents came looking for her. She "first had sexual intercourse on a starry night, in a haystack, without contraception." She later told The New York Times that "I am not happy about that, but I know much better now and so does everyone who listens to my radio program." Next, she lived on Moshav Nahalal, and then, she lived on Kibbutz Yagur. She then moved to Jerusalem in 1948 to study early childhood education.

Westheimer joined the Haganah Jewish Zionist underground paramilitary organization (later, the Israel Defense Forces) in Jerusalem. Because of her diminutive height of 4 feet 7 inches (140 cm), 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. 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. 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 and supported herself by teaching kindergarten. She then taught psychology at the Sorbonne. 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.

United States

In 1956, using a 5,000 German marks restitution cheque paid by the German government to children whose education was disrupted by the Holocaust, she immigrated to the United States with her French boyfriend, Dan Bommer, settling in Washington Heights, Manhattan. They married and had a daughter, Miriam, but soon divorced. She worked as a maid, initially for 75 cents an hour and later for one dollar an hour (equal to $11.84 today) to put herself through graduate school.