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."
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