Best-selling author and sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, known commonly as Dr. Ruth, died on Friday at her New York City home at the age of 96.
She died surrounded by her family, according to her publicist and friend Pierre Leff.
A pop culture phenomenon in America in the 1980s, Westheimer was beloved by fans for her outspokenness on taboo sexual topics and her nationally syndicated radio and television shows.
Most people would call this little lady A petite, vivacious woman with a strong accent and a mischievous laughHer life before fame was complicated and full of tragedy.
Holocaust survivor and fight for Israel’s independence
Born Carola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, in Wiesenfeld, Germany, she was the only child of two children. Jew Orthodox parents.
When I was 10 years old, Anti-Jewish massacres of November 1938 During this incident, known as Kristallnacht, her father Nazis She was sent to a concentration camp. Soon after, her mother and grandmother put her on a train to Switzerland, where she was placed in an orphanage. That was the last time she saw her family.
Time War in Europe When the war ended, at age 16, she traveled to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where she received military training as part of an underground Zionist organization called the Haganah. Israel She was working towards statehood, during which she became a sniper and was seriously injured in an explosion at her barracks.
In 1950, she moved to Paris with her first husband, an Israeli soldier, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne, but later divorced and emigrated again, this time to the United States.
A new life and a new mission in America
In New York she raised her daughter Miriam from her second marriage and met and married her third husband in 1961. She was a Jewish refugee. The Holocaust He survived her until her death in 1997. The marriage produced a son named Joel.
Westheimer earned his doctorate in education and immediately began coaching professors on how to teach. sex educationRealizing that she lacked experience in sex education, she took a class with renowned sex therapist Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan.
By 1980, she was hosting a radio show in New York City called “Sexually Speaking.” Her frank and unbiased advice on subjects like female orgasm, masturbation, consent, and homosexuality was especially popular during the conservative Reagan administration and the 1990s. AIDSHowever, it became an unexpected hit, and the show was eventually syndicated and sold to multiple networks simultaneously.
Use your national fame to entertain, advocate and educate
Her humorous image of a petite Jewish woman doling out frank sexual advice was widely embraced, making her a favorite among talk show audiences and readers of popular magazines.
Westheimer ultimately wrote 40 books and for decades penned regular columns advising people to have more satisfying sex lives, consistently emphasizing the idea that there is nothing shameful about human sexual activity.
She said that although she considers herself old-fashioned in her thinking, it’s important for people to talk about sex, demystify it and educate themselves, something that has become increasingly important with the rise of the AIDS epidemic.
Westheimer was a strong believer in monogamy and was a vocal advocate of condom use. abortion Rights and Gay rightsShe said her own past experiences had inspired her to stand up for people who far-right Christians in the US have called “subhuman”.
Westheimer, a recipient of numerous awards and the subject of documentaries and one-man plays, often spoke of his gratitude for surviving the Holocaust and said he felt it was his duty to give something back to the world.
“I never knew that my ultimate contribution to the world would be to talk about orgasms and erections,” she told Harvard Business Review in 2016, “but I knew that to justify being alive, I had to do something for other people.”
Dr. Ruth Westerheimer is survived by her two children and four grandchildren.
js/dj (AFP, Associated Press)
