Dr. Ruth at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry
July 14, 2024
Ruth Westheimer, who died July 12 at age 96, was called the Lion of Judah by New York City parks commissioner Henry Stern.
The sexologist’s giggly roar was redolent of accents from her own life trajectory: German, Hebrew, Swiss, French, and finally American. Her eventual life and career triumphs were examples of what the French Jewish neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik analyzed as resilience. Cyrulnik’s parents, like Westheimer’s German Jewish mishpocheh, were murdered by the Nazis.
Part of Westheimer’s survival strategy was to not dwell on the profound tragedies in her life as a German Jewish woman. A 1987 coauthored memoir offered surprisingly little of a personal nature and only for the 2019 documentary film Ask Dr. Ruth did she visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims, to find out precise information about when and where her parents were killed.
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Karlstadt am Main, Westheimer found fortitude in a maxim from her Orthodox Jewish grandmother, “Trust in God,” even if this approach did not work for Bubbe during the Holocaust.
Westheimer only survived because she was shipped to a Swiss orphanage just before the war with a few dozen other German Jewish children and grew up there like a Jewish Jane Eyre, tutoring younger pupils, who may have empathized with her because of her diminutive stature and effervescent personality.
As an adult, she stood 4’7″, and Westheimer always saw being small as a positive attraction. In 2019, when she received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and in related interviews, she implied that she had the hots for former Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion: “He was short!”
Instead she settled for Fred Westheimer, eventually gravitating to an apartment on 190th Street in Washington Heights near two synagogues where she was a member: the Reform Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation and the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale. She was also a member of the Orthodox synagogue Ohav Shalom until it closed in 2006 and served as president of the YMHA of Washington Heights and Inwood.
Part of this intense socializing may have been due to family tragedy, as Westheimer stated in an American Jewish Committee advertisement printed in 1997 in the New York Times:
“Yes, [Nazis] destroyed my family, including my beloved parents and grandparents, but they couldn’t eradicate my will to live and pass on to my children and grandchildren my love for Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish people. For me, the phrase ‘Am Yisrael chai’ — ‘The Jewish people lives’ — holds special meaning.”
Although she co-wrote a book about sex in Jewish tradition for New York University Press, Westheimer was no Talmudic scholar. In interviews she would airily attribute to the Talmud a paraphrased Yiddish proverb, “Ven der Putz shtayt, der saychel gayt,” that was cited in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint as “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd,” to convey that intellectual capacity diminishes in a state of erotic arousal.
Nevertheless, Westheimer’s book on Eros in the Bible managed to convey that God is a mensch, tolerant and forgiving of human vagaries.
Westheimer was helped in difficult times with comparable benevolence. As a single mother in New York with no high school diploma, she was offered childcare by Jewish Family Services while she obtained master’s and doctoral degrees in education, working with Shirley Zussman, a Jewish specialist in family life studies and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist.
A brief stint at Planned Parenthood in Harlem was followed by some adjunct teaching at, among other places, Brooklyn College, where she was fired for reasons she never publicly divulged. But unemployment allowed her time to begin radio broadcasting, which grew into an enduring media career.
Historically, as a Jewish sexologist Westheimer belonged to a long tradition, preceded by elders like Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Ellis, and Gershon Legman; and alongside such contemporaries as Ira Reiss and Fritz Klein. Yet her immediate precedent as self-appointed mass media pop Jewish sex counselor was the psychiatrist David Reuben.
Even when published in 1969, Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (*But Were Afraid to Ask) was derided for its claims that lesbianism is supposedly “immature” and that “food seems to have a mysterious fascination for homosexuals. Many of the world’s greatest chefs have been homosexuals.” Another Reuben observation: “Some of the fattest people are homosexuals.”
While appearing on the same TV chat shows as Reuben, unlike him, Westheimer maintained the seriousness of a therapist amidst the expected audience guffaws at her subject matter.
To prevent Reuben-style mishegas on the subject of gender minorities, Westheimer studied with the American Jewish therapist and LGBT rights advocate Charles Silverstein at New York’s Institute for Human Identity.
When Westheimer appeared on television, she did so discerningly, turning down an offer to host Saturday Night Live when it would have taken too much time from her busy professional schedule.
Her encounters on camera with Jewish comedians ranged from Richard Lewis, who apparently saw the occasion as a free public therapy session, to Jerry Seinfeld who, although seated right next to her, screamed at her, or Jackie Mason, who made curiously bitter allusions to her earnings.
Her closest rapport with any Jew on TV was likely with Joan Rivers, although Rivers complained that Westheimer’s latest book contained no revelations about the author’s intimate life. In 1993, Westheimer and Israeli TV host Arad Nir hosted a talk show in Hebrew, Min Tochnit, which may be freely translated as “A Sort of Program on Sex” for Israel’s Channel 2.
Her fascination with Israel and its people continued into old age. Possibly as a way of better understanding her own complex trajectory, she delved into ethnography, studying Ethiopian Jews and Druze Israelis. She filmed the 2007 PBS documentary The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strength of the Druze (2007) and produced an accompanying book coauthored with journalist Gil Sedan.
Throughout, she remembered her origins and how narrowly she had escaped annihilation. On each visit to London, she paid her respects at that city’s commemorative statue honoring the Jewish children who had escaped wartime Fascist Europe on the so-called Kindertransport. The London statue was created by the Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler, himself a Polish Jew saved by being evacuated to the UK.
Reflecting on her overall experience, Westheimer liked to remind interviewers of the Eshet Chayil (woman of valor) from the Book of Proverbs, traditionally sung on Shabbat, after the Shalom Aleichem hymn, in which angels are welcomed to the home.
In the text, the valorous woman’s children rise to celebrate her and her husband offers this praise: “Many daughters have attained valor, but you have surpassed them all.”
As with many of Westheimer’s statements, this would be paraphrased to journalists with a dazzling grin to show that she meant the allusion half-humorously, yet her evident intelligence always showed seriousness of intent.
Ruth Westheimer was indeed a woman of valor, a Lion of Judah. And for her, Eshet Chayil was a victorious conjugal dialogue, referring to a husband’s personal life in which his spouse had excelled beyond all others.
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