Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the psychologist better known as the sex therapist Dr. Ruth, has died at age 96.
A spokesperson said Westheimer died Friday, July 12, at home in New York City, according to The New York Times. No cause of death has been publicized. Westheimer is survived by son Joel, daughter Miriam, and four grandchildren, the newspaper reports.
Westheimer became a star in her 50s, when her WYNY radio show, Sexually Speaking, launched in New York City in 1980.
The success of that program — which started as a 15-minute program but later expanded to two hours, according to The Washington Post — led to the Lifetime TV program Good Sex With Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
Besides her radio and TV work, Westheimer also had books, a Playgirl column, TV commercials, and even a board game and a computer game to her name.
Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, to Orthodox Jewish parents Julius and Irma Siegel. During the Holocaust, Westheimer’s family sent her to safety in Switzerland, and her parents are presumed to have been killed at Auschwitz.
As an adult, Westheimer trained as a sniper with the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, and trained as a sniper for Israeli independence, but she was seriously injured by an exploding shell in 1948, according to the Times.
Westheimer then studied psychology in Paris, moved to the United States, and received a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research in 1959. She later became a Planned Parenthood project director and earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University in 1970. And she trained under sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan and taught at Lehman College and Brooklyn College. Her media career started after a WYNY community affairs manager heard a lecture of hers.
In a 1985 New York Times Magazine profile, William E. Geist wrote that the 4-foot-7 Westheimer “looks for all the world as though she is about tell us in her cheery mittel-European accent how to make a nice apple strudel.”
“But when she opens her mouth it’s Code-Blue-in-the-family-room all across the country,” Geist added. “She sends forth on radio and television the most explicit insert-tab-A-into-slot-B instruction in sexual manipulation, stimulation, and satisfaction.”