NEW YORK—Dr. Ruth Westheimer, known popularly as Dr. Ruth, passed away Friday at the age of 96 years old in her home in New York City, her publicist told the Associated Press.
A sexual health and wellness expert and survivor of the Holocaust during the Second World War, Westheimer proved that frankness and honesty about sex were the way.
"She was restful when she passed away. Her son and daughter were with her and holding her hand at that moment," said Pierre Lehu, Dr. Ruth's publicist and a co-author, via a statement sent to the news media. "It was as peacefully as she could possibly go."
Westheimer held various roles advocating for sexual well-being and evidence-based sexual education. She was a sex therapist, talk show host, author and academic covering these topics. What set Dr. Ruth apart was her candor, which contributed to her popular culture profile during the 1980s. Her radio call-in talk show, "Sexually Speaking," was at one point the highest-rated talk show in some of the country's largest radio markets, like in New York City. Dr. Ruth then launched her eponymous television show, The Dr. Ruth Show, which attracted millions of viewers each week at its peak.
Dr. Ruth also authored a national advice column and appeared in groundbreaking Playboy-produced videos on the virtues of open discourse on sexuality. During this period, she was also squarely in support of the LGBTQ+ community, having spoken in favor of equal rights and protecting the health and rights of gay men during the AIDS epidemic.
She was also a champion for equality as a response to far-right groups who have called some groups of people to be "subhuman," citing her own past as a survivor of Nazi Germany's genocidal crimes against innocent Jews. Born in 1928 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt, she was sent away by her parents when she was just 10 to nearby neutral Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht, which was a precursor to the Shoah—the Hebrew word for "catasrophe" that has been used to describe the loss of millions of lives. Her parents were killed.
"I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis—because I survived—I had an obligation to make a dent in the world," she told The Guardian in November 2012. "What I didn't know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night."
In 1995, she told the New York Times, "I come from Nazi Germany ... and the one thing I've learned is that you must stand up for what you believe."
Dr. Ruth is the author of Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex (1983), Human Sexuality: A Psychosocial Perspective (1991), The Art of Arousal (1993), and many more.
