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Ruth Westheimer, Ed.D (born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928) is a popular American sex therapist and author best known as Dr. Ruth.
Biography
Westheimer was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family. During World War II, she was sent without her parents to Switzerland when she was ten years old.
In 1945, she learned that her parents had perished in the Holocaust, most likely at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and decided to immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine where she joined the Haganah in Jerusalem. Despite her diminutive height of 4 feet 7 inches, she was trained as a sniper. Westheimer was seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and it was several months before she was able to walk again.
In 1950, she moved to France, where she studied and taught psychology at the University of Paris. In 1956, she emigrated to the United States, where she earned a master's in sociology and an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. She completed post-doctoral work in human sexuality at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is multilingual, speaking English, German, French and Hebrew.
Her pioneering TV show Sexually Speaking first aired in 1980 as a 15-minute taped show, which has since increased in popularity and has been nationally syndicated, as is her radio show. She is known to be candid and funny, but respectful.
In recent years, she has made regular appearances on the PBS Television children's show Between the Lions as "Dr. Ruth Wordheimer" in a parody of her therapist role, in which she helps anxious readers and spellers overcome their fear of long words.
Westheimer has written several books on human sexuality including Dr. Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex and Sex For Dummies. She has taught as lecturer and professor at New York University and led a recent sex seminar at Yale.
She was married three times. Her third marriage, to Manfred Westheimer, lasted until his death in 1997. She has two children, Miriam and Joel, and several grandchildren.
Popular culture
- The notably short-statured and German-accented Westheimer was occasionally parodied by Mary Gross during her tenure at Saturday Night Live. Gross would be a guest on the News segment, playing Westheimer with a thick accent, and sitting behind the desk where only her head and occasionally her raised arms showed.
- Westheimer served as a panelist on revivals of television game shows To Tell the Truth (1990) and Hollywood Squares (1998).
- Westheimer guest-starred as herself on an episode of Quantum Leap, as the person who "leaped" and switched places with the program's time-travelling main character. She was the only celebrity guest star to do so on the program.
- Westheimer made many appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien during the 1990's as one of Conan's many characters that also included Mr. T, Abe Vigoda, Carl "Oldy" Olsen, Al Roker, NBC Announcer Joel Goddard, The Liberal-Bias Ski-Reporter, Loser at the Beach, Nipple-Hair Don King, Pimpbot 5000, the Masturbating Bear, and of course Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. In one of Dr. Ruth's most notable appearances, she attempted to re-create the World Series by playing a pretend game of baseball with several of the aforementioned characters.
- She appears as Dr. Ruth Weisenheimer on David Endochrine's show in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. In it, she is killed by the Joker, ironically destroyed by his poisoned-lipstick kiss when she had been talking about sex five minutes previously.
External links
de:Ruth Westheimer
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