Ruth Westheimer, who brought frank talk about sex into America’s living rooms for the first time as radio and television talk show host Dr. Ruth, has died. She was 96.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, a spokesperson told the New York Times.
The diminutive educator with a thick German accent was known for dispensing explicit, down-to-earth advice on matters that weren’t previously discussed on-air.
Westheimer hosted at least five shows on Lifetime and other cable stations from 1984 to 1993, and wrote dozens of books on sex.
The college professor was already in her 50s when she started her radio show on New York radio station WYNY in 1980. She later said that being middle-aged probably helped her be accepted as an expert rather than a sex object, as discussing erotic pleasure was largely taboo on radio and television before her show.
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Debuting as a 15-minute segment at midnight on Saturdays, the advice show quickly gained popularity and by 1984 it was syndicated nationwide as “The Dr. Ruth Show.”
That same year, she moved to television and began hosting Lifetime’s “Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer,” which became “The Dr. Ruth Show” when it expanded the next year to a full hour. In 1987, she began another half hour syndicated series called “Ask Dr. Ruth.”
Westheimer went on to host “The All New Dr. Ruth Show” and teen advice shows “What’s Up, Dr. Ruth” and “You’re on the Air With Dr. Ruth.”
During the 1980s and 1990s she was a bona fide media personality, appearing frequently on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Late Night With David Letterman,” as well as on “Hollywood Squares,” in an episode of “Quantum Leap” and on TV commercials.
Born in Wiesenfeld, Germany, in 1928 to an Orthodox family, her father was taken away by the Nazis after Cristellnacht and was later killed at Auschwitz. At age 10, her family sent her to a Swiss orphanage to keep her safe, where she borrowed books from the boys to continue her education, which was forbidden to girls. After she stopped receiving letters from her mother and grandmother, she never heard from them again.
She emigrated to Palestine at the age of 17, where she trained as a scout and sniper and was seriously wounded by a shell. After moving to Paris with her first husband, she began studying psychology before moving to New York, where she earned her masters in sociology in 1959. She later earned a PhD in education.
Her frankness about sex helped mainstream America embrace the burgeoning women’s rights and abortion rights movements. “From the beginning, I said a woman has the responsibility for her own sexual satisfaction,” she told NPR. “And that has certainly helped the movement.”
Westheimer had been reticent to speak about her traumatic early life until “Ask Dr. Ruth,” a Hulu documentary about her life, premiered in 2019. The documentary showed her traveling to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to research records of her family and showed her at home in her longtime Manhattan apartment with her children and grandchildren. Her life was also portrayed in the 2013 Off-Broadway play “Becoming Dr. Ruth.”
She continued to be active on social media, as well as teaching and making media appearances into her nineties.
Westheimer was married three times; her last husband, Fred Westheimer, died in 1997. She is survived by two children and four grandchildren.