Sex-talk is not hard to find these days. There are more podcasts, YouTube channels, TED Talks, and TV series devoted to sex than you could consume in a single lifetime, even if you lived as long as Methuselah. And so many books have now been published about sex that you could stock an entire Library of Alexandria-sized collection with sex-related volumes alone. But there was once a time when reliable, science-based, compassionate discussions about sex were as rare as a snowball in the summer. One woman changed all that, and, in doing so, helped create the guilt-free sex-talk culture that we now take for granted. Her name was Ruth Westheimer — or, as she was known to her millions of grateful fans, “Dr. Ruth.”
Some people are part of history. Others make history. Dr. Ruth, who died on July 12 at the age of 96, was definitely in the latter category — but she also lived through (and participated in) epochal world-historical events. Born as Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928, Ruth grew up in a comfortable German-Jewish household until the advent of Nazism in 1933 began to make Jewish life in Germany progressively more impossible. After Kristallnacht in 1938, when the worst for German Jews was starting to become imaginable, her mother secured a spot for her in one of the Kindertransports, the efforts to rescue Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Most of the approximately 10,000 children who were saved in this manner from deportations to concentration camps were transported to England, while some others, including Ruth, were sent to neutral Switzerland. In this manner she survived the Holocaust; her parents, whom she never saw again after her transport to Switzerland, were not as fortunate.
Following the war Ruth immigrated to then-British mandate Palestine, where she fought in the 1948 Israel War of Independence as a sniper. After recuperating from a serious leg injury, she moved to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne, and then to America in 1956, where she enrolled in a master’s program in sociology and, with the help of night classes, earned a doctorate in education. Her trajectory in psychology began to come into greater focus in 1967, when she took a part-time job with Planned Parenthood in Harlem, and crystallized while conducting postdoctoral work on sexuality at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Ruth may have had a quiet, unglamorous life as a sex therapist in private practice if not for Betty Elam, a community affairs manager at the New York radio station WYNY. Intrigued by a talk on sexual well-being that she had happened to hear Dr. Ruth deliver, Elam asked her if she’d be willing to speak about these topics on the radio. These initial WYNY segments, titled Sexually Speaking, quickly became immensely popular, despite airing only once a week after midnight. A live call-in radio show (as the program would later become) that provided useful, expert information on sex was particularly valuable in the pre-internet age when you couldn’t just Google “Why won’t my wife sleep with me?” or “How long should sex last?”
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Sexually Speaking led to a full radio show that, by 1983, became the highest-rated radio show in the country’s largest media market. From there, like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, Ruth Westheimer became “Dr. Ruth.” The WYNY radio show led to syndicated columns, book deals, magazine features (including one on the cover of People), commercials, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1982, and her highly-rated daytime TV show which by 1985 was being watched by as many as 2 million people. American culture had clearly been ready for frank, well-informed, helpful conversations about sexuality — but who could’ve predicted that it would take a tiny old German woman to get us there?
I’ll never forget the time I heard her speak at a New York synagogue. I couldn’t get over how this 4-foot-7-inch woman who sounded like a female version of Henry Kissinger and who looked like George Costanza’s mother was talking openly and unashamedly about masturbation, orgasms, and sexual fantasies — and in the same sanctuary where we’d just prayed the evening prayer! But if Dr. Ruth was sacrilegious, then so is the Talmud, where discussions about sex are featured in the same sacred pages as those that cover Sabbath rituals and biblical tort laws. What is irreligious, taught Dr. Ruth — taking a page from the Talmud — is living without knowing how to fully enjoy one of the few great (and completely free) pleasures that God has given us.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.