Ruth Westheimer, a brave Jewish woman, has died at the age of 96. – The Forward

Dr. Ruth at the Tribeca Film Festival 2019. Photo by Getty Images

By Benjamin Ivry
July 14, 2024

Ruth Westheimer, who died on July 12 at the age of 96, was called the “Lion of Judah” by New York City Parks Commissioner Henry Stern.

The sexologist’s giggling roar recalled accents from her own life: German, Hebrew, Swiss, French and finally American. Her later successes in life and career were examples of what the French-Jewish neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik analyzed as resilience. Cyrulnik’s parents, like Westheimer’s German-Jewish Mischpochewere murdered by the Nazis.

Part of Westheimer’s survival strategy was to avoid dealing with the profound tragedies of her life as a German-Jewish woman. Her 1987 memoir, which she co-wrote with others, contained surprisingly little personal material, and only for the 2019 documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth” did she visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims, to obtain precise information about when and where her parents were murdered.

Westheimer, born Karola Ruth Siegel in Karlstadt am Main, drew strength from a motto of her Orthodox Jewish grandmother: “Trust in God,” even though this approach did not work for Bubbe during the Holocaust.

Westheimer survived only because she was shipped off to a Swiss orphanage shortly before the war along with several dozen other German-Jewish children and grew up there like a Jewish Jane Eyre, teaching younger students who may have felt sympathy for her because of her small stature and lively personality.

As an adult, she was 4 feet 7 inches tall, and Westheimer always viewed her small size as a positive. When she received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2019 and in related interviews, she hinted that she had the hots for former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion: “He was small!”

Instead, she chose Fred Westheimer and eventually moved into an apartment on 190th Street in Washington Heights, near two synagogues of which she was a member: the Reform Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation and the Conservative Adath Israel Synagogue of Riverdale. She was also a member of the Orthodox Ohav Shalom Synagogue until it closed in 2006 and served as president of the YMHA of Washington Heights and Inwood.

This intense social life may have been partly due to a family tragedy, as Westheimer explained in a 1997 American Jewish Committee ad in the New York Times:

“Yes, (the Nazis) destroyed my family, including my beloved parents and grandparents, but they could not extinguish my will to live and pass on my love for Judaism, Israel and the Jewish people to my children and grandchildren. For me, the phrase ‘Am Yisrael chai’ – ‘The Jewish people live’ – has a special meaning.”

Although she had co-written a book on sex in the Jewish tradition for New York University Press, Westheimer was not a Talmudic scholar. In interviews, she carelessly attributed a paraphrased Yiddish proverb to the Talmud: “Ven der Putz shtayt, der saychel gayt”, which in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaints is referred to as “When the plaster is in place, the box lies in the dryer’ to convey that intellectual abilities decline in a state of erotic arousal.

Nevertheless, Westheimer’s book on Eros in the Bible succeeds in conveying that God is a human being who is tolerant and forgiving of human whims.

Westheimer was helped with comparable generosity during difficult times. As a single mother in New York without a high school diploma, Jewish Family Services offered her child care while she earned her master’s and doctorate in education and worked with Shirley Zussman, a Jewish family studies specialist, and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist.

A brief stint at Planned Parenthood in Harlem was followed by a teaching stint, including at Brooklyn College, where she was fired for reasons she never disclosed publicly. But unemployment gave her time to start working in radio, which developed into a permanent media career.

Historically, Westheimer belonged to a long tradition as a Jewish sexologist, preceded by elders such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Ellis, and Gershon Legman, and by contemporaries such as Ira Reiss and Fritz Klein. But her immediate predecessor as a self-proclaimed Jewish sex consultant to the mass media was the psychiatrist David Reuben.

Even when Reuben’s book was published in 1969, Everything you always wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask)) was ridiculed for his claims that lesbianism was supposedly “immature” and that “food seems to hold a mysterious fascination for homosexuals. Many of the world’s greatest chefs have been homosexuals.” Another observation from Reuben: “Some of the fattest people are homosexuals.”

Unlike Reuben, Westheimer maintained the seriousness of a therapist during her appearances on the same TV talk shows, even as the audience predictably laughed loudly at her topics.

To avoid Reuben-style mishearsals on the subject of gender minorities, Westheimer studied under American Jewish therapist and LGBT rights activist Charles Silverstein at New York’s Institute for Human Identity.

When Westheimer appeared on television, she did so with caution and turned down an offer Saturday Night Live if this would have taken up too much time from their busy career schedule.

Her on-camera encounters with Jewish comedians ranged from Richard Lewis, who apparently viewed the event as a free public therapy session, to Jerry Seinfeld, who yelled at her even though he was sitting right next to her, or Jackie Mason, who made strangely bitter references to her income.

Her closest relationship with a Jew on television was probably with Joan Rivers, although Rivers complained that Westheimer’s latest book did not contain any revelations about the author’s private life. In 1993, Westheimer and Israeli television host Arad Nir hosted a talk show in Hebrew. Min Tochnitwhich can be loosely translated as “A kind of program about sex” for the Israeli Channel 2.

Her fascination with Israel and its people continued into old age. Perhaps to better understand her own complex development, she immersed herself in ethnography and studied Ethiopian Jews and Druze Israelis. In 2007, she made the PBS documentary The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strength of the Druze (2007) and produced an accompanying book co-written with journalist Gil Sedan.

She always remembered her origins and how close she had been to annihilation. On every visit to London, she paid her respects to the city’s memorial statue dedicated to the Jewish children who escaped fascist Europe during the war on the so-called Children’s transportThe London statue was created by Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler, himself a Polish Jew who was saved by his evacuation to Britain.

When reflecting on her overall experience, Westheimer liked to remind interviewers of the Eshet Chayil (brave woman) from the Book of Proverbs, is traditionally sung on Shabbat after the Shalom Aleichem hymn, which welcomes angels into the home.

In the text, the brave woman’s children rise to celebrate her, and her husband offers this praise: “Many daughters have attained valor, but you have surpassed them all.”

Like many of Westheimer’s statements, she would paraphrase this one to reporters with a beaming grin, showing that although she had half-joked, her obvious intelligence always betrayed a serious intent.

Ruth Westheimer was indeed a brave woman, a Lion of Judah. ​​And for her, Eshet Chayil was a victorious marital dialogue that addressed the private life of a husband in which his wife had surpassed all others.

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