My Neighbor, Dr. Ruth

Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were undimmed and his strength undiminished. — Deuteronomy 34:7

In this dark and precarious moment, I miss my former upstairs neighbor, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She died on July 12, at 96.

But you know that, because Dr. Ruth was famous. She found celebrity in the 1980s, hosting a New York radio show called Sexually Speaking (or as she might say: Zzzexooally Shpeakinnnk). Her stardom had less to do with boudoir hacks than an unsinkable persona: German accent, hobbity frame, the warmth of a thousand suns.

Dr. Ruth didn’t become a household name until she was in her mid-fifties. Nothing about her aspired to Hollywood’s articulation of hotness. The schtick was that she was a cute little old lady who talked dirty. (In 1982, saying penis on a national TV counted as talking dirty.) This made her an ironic celebrity to Gen Xers who watched David Letterman. Still, about her vocation she was serious and brave. It was no joke, being frank about intimacy when most Americans were terrified of it.

These days, nobody thinks of 54 as grandmotherly (in the clip above, she was a year younger than Jennifer Aniston is now). Yet Dr. Ruth was declared Grandma Freud at that early vintage. Cuteness made her a safe harbor in the AIDS era. Audiences could absorb a spiel about foreplay as comedy and leave with a healthier understanding of desire. It was an ingenious act of subversion.

She really was funny. Like any good comic, Dr. Ruth played it straight, discussing orgazzm while talk show hosts feigned mortification. As a kid, I thought she was so hilarious I tried out an impersonation on my mother. “Are you doing Ruth Westheimer?” she gasped, looking as if she’d spat out the world’s sharpest lemon. “I know that woman. She’s always been crass. She’ll say anything to promote herself.”

It turned out my mother had crossed paths with Dr. Ruth paths years before, when the sex therapist (then just another hustling academic) spoke to a women’s group. The lecture was some kind of prehistoric Vagina Monologue. My mother wasn’t about to take lessons in self-pleasure from a gnome who sounded like Dr. Strangelove. The episode put an eternal blot on the Westheimer name.

Strain to imagine this, but not long ago, making spectacle of yourself by talking about sex in public was something well brought-up adults just did not do. But like Richard Simmons (who died on July 13), Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, and inevitably, Donald Trump, Dr. Ruth was at the vanguard of an earthier popular culture.

Mostly spawned in the Gotham media market and cycled through Page Six, the Tonight Show, and People, these personalities became part of the entertainment landscape in the Reagan years. My mother was also a product of New York, and an immigrant daughter whose parents talked funny. She was appalled. She’s not here to ask, but I suspect she found Dr. Ruth vulgar because she reminded her of a place she’d escaped. In any case, she would have burst into flames before saying another V-word.

Years later, I happened to move into Dr. Ruth’s building way uptown, near the highest point in Manhattan. Despite her fame, she still lived in the same apartment she’d owned since 1956. My wife and I purchased a place on the same line, a flew floors down in that red brick tower above the Hudson. We bought what we could afford: A home with a view of the P.S. 187 schoolyard, not the river. But it had room enough for us and two small kids.

Realtors call the area Hudson Heights, but it’s really a thumb-like protrusion of Washington Heights, of Lin-Manuel Miranda fame. When the larger neighborhood declined in the postwar years, the plateau between the George Washington Bridge and the Cloisters remained a stable community of coop apartment houses, inhabited by so many German Jewish refugees it used to be called Frankfurt on the Hudson.

Dr. Ruth was part of that wave. So was Henry Kissinger, whose family rented a two-bedroom around the corner on Fort Washington Avenue in 1938 (his mother Paula stayed in the place until her 1998 death). My maternal grandmother and her sisters lived a few blocks south after landing in America from South America. Our realtor sold the neighborhood “a naturally occurring retirement community.”

Over the years, actors, musicians, and young families migrated to the Heights, but the old timers hung on. They sat on the benches in Fort Tryon Park, turned out in fedoras and tweed skirts. West Indian care workers hovered over these émigrés while they kibitzed in German. In the evenings, there was a persistent wail of sirens, signaling that another member of this klatch required an ambulance. But the playgrounds were filled with children, and the mix of the very old and the very young gave the place its charm. After hurtling uptown, away from the heat and crush of Midtown, you surfaced in a hill town bathed by breezes coming off the Hudson. A friend visiting from the real world dubbed it Rivendell, after Middle Earth’s hidden kingdom of elves.

On my first day in the building, Dr. Ruth stepped into the elevator, thrust out her tiny hand, and wrung mine vigorously. To meet her in person was to get the product as advertised—a swirl of tangerine hair, red-rimmed glasses, that accent. A four foot, seven inch package could not restrain NBA-sized charisma. When she found out where I worked at the time, she beamed. “You know vhat? I haf been in People magazzzine,” she said. “Und I even haf a zubscrippppzzzshun!”

Subsequent encounters provided years of material. I treated all comers to a refined Dr. Ruth impersonation, which was still closer to Sgt. Schultz or Frau Blücher. My send-up of our famous neighbor read bedtime stories to the children: Go dog, go! Ze liiight ist rrred now! Shtopp dog shtopp! Ze liight ist gween now!

The real Dr. Ruth bustled about the building, waving off the doormen as she toted boxes of files from her apartment to an idling SUV. She was always making a beeline to New Haven, where she lectured. Occasionally, my wife pulled up behind her in traffic. A puff of hair was barely visible over the steering wheel, as if a muppet had absconded with a light truck. “How is Dr. Ruth possibly allowed to drive?” she’d say. Without knowing it, our neighbor became a scene-stealing bit player in our lives.

Americans have a habit of condescending to older women. They are saddled with the weird burden of telling us that aging is another sassy lifestyle choice. Calling Ruth Bader-Ginsberg a badass isn’t a feminist compliment. It plops a complex and flawed individual on a shelf beside Hummel figurines. At least Antonin Scalia was allowed to grow old without being patted on the head for his pep.

Dr. Ruth was in her 80s when I knew her. Her well-documented life was shadowed by the Holocaust. She had two early failed marriages before meeting her beloved husband Fred, who died in 1997. But by disposition or calculation, she was adorable. If being compared to Minnie Mouse annoyed her, she never let it show.

Maybe her grown kids, Joel and Miriam, were irritated by a default mode permanently set on Vim. Maybe her exes had dirt on her. Maybe she berated long-suffering assistants, if such people existed. I only knew Dr. Ruth from the elevator. On that platform, she gave the public what it wanted.

Other than my mother, the only person I know who has a bad word to say about Dr. Ruth is a friend who once found himself sitting next to her on airplane. It was a long haul flight, and at some point, she moved back from first class to comfort the crying infant she was traveling with. My friend took this as an arrogant imposition.

“She just sat there grinning at me, while the baby screamed in my ear,” he said. “It was like, I’m Dr. Ruth, and I’m going to give the fancy people upfront a break and make you proles lose sleep while I give you a smile. Well, F- you, Dr. Ruth.”

If the worst thing Dr. Ruth ever did was remove a child from the company of frazzled parents and try to soothe it in coach, she’s sailing through heavenly customs. Surely she committed some real sins behind closed doors. But when it came to being good in public, she was determined to be caught trying.

What made her that way? The chaos we’re living through has me thinking about resilience—how some people thrive after enduring real horrors, while the rest of us struggle to shake off the most trifling slight.

Like so many Americans, I’ve not recovered from the convulsions of 2020. Four years on, we’re still being hammered by outrages, or immersive media makes it feel that way. My old neighbor probably wouldn’t put up with such moaning. Her example makes me like I’m missing a piece of vital equipment. Dr. Ruth’s sex-talk empire doesn’t interest me. Dr. Ruth, a peculiar and tenacious person, is another matter.

Karola Ruth Siegel was born into an Orthodox family in what is now Karlstadt am Main, Bavaria. An only child, she was doted on by her parents, Irma and Julius. Her attitudes were partly shaped by going to shul with her father, garment wholesaler. If God had given humanity sex, sexual impulses were nothing to be ashamed of.

Julius Siegel was arrested after Kristallnacht. In 1939, Irma sent Karola to a Jewish children’s home in Switzerland to keep her safe. The entire Siegel family perished in the camps while she was in exile. As an orphaned 17-year-old, she emigrated to the British Mandate for Palestine and began going by Ruth. She kept Karola as her middle name, in case a missing loved one came searching for her. They never did.

These parts of Dr. Ruth’s biography, like nearly everything about her, are well-publicized. The Zionist iteration of Ruth Siegel picked tomatoes on a kibbutz and trained to be a sniper for the Haganah. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, she was badly wounded in an attack on a bomb shelter. An explosion killed the two women next to her; she nearly lost both her feet from the shrapnel. It was her 20th birthday.

After a long hospitalization, she resumed training as a kindergarten teacher. She married David Bar-Haim, an Israeli medical student, and moved with him to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne. Her first husband returned to Israel without her. The Parisian Ruth fell in love with a Frenchman, Dan Bommer. With reparations funds from the German government, the couple moved to New York in 1956. They wed and had a daughter, Miriam, but split within a year.

American Ruth struggled as a single mother in the diaspora of Washington Heights. Thanks to a scholarship, she took night classes in sociology at the New School. Jewish Family Services provided caregivers for Miriam so she could earn a living. Her master’s thesis dealt with the impact of the war on refugee children. In 1960, she met Fred Westheimer, another Holocaust survivor, on a Catskills ski trip. They soon married and he adopted her daughter. Their son Joel arrived in 1963.

The Westheimers built a new life in the apartment upstairs from mine. Miriam and Joel went to the best schools and earned professional degrees. At the start of the sexual revolution, Ruth found her calling working for the Harlem branch of Planned Parenthood. She gained a doctorate in Family Life Studies in 1970 and then studied under Helen Singer Kaplan, a pioneering sex therapist. Along the way, Dr. Ruth was born. “A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained,” she liked to say. And most famously: “When it comes to sex, the most important six inches are the ones between the ears.”

In the early 1980s, she did weekly spots on WYNY, a local radio outlet, for $25 a pop. That led to her own late night broadcast, which made her a sensation. The nationally syndicated Ask Dr. Ruth followed. Celebrity Dr. Ruth wrote more than 30 self-help books and appeared on Melrose Place, Ally McBeal, and Quantum Leap. By the time I met her, that TV career was winding down. Still, she ran a private practice and gave advice via her website. Her life was celebrated in a 2019 documentary. In 2023, New York State appointed her its first Ambassador to Loneliness to raise awareness about the risks of social isolation.

Such accomplishments were surface gloss on a more primal legend: Dr. Ruth is plucky. She is reassuring. She survives. I do not believe survival was the product of simplistic positive thinking, though she might spin it that way. For all we know, she shut her apartment door each night and collapsed into sobs. But something in Dr. Ruth smothered demons. Maybe it was embedded in her genes. Or maybe, with German Jewish discipline, she steeled herself to smile while babies screamed.

From my own elders, mostly gone now, I’ve seen shadings of that behavior. A veil is pulled between generations, and American children are sealed off from the toxic past. Darkness may flicker across the face of an émigré, but memories of murder and deprivation are locked in a private hell. Children can wind up feeling cheated in that arrangement. I never really knew my own mother, and she never really knew her parents, who also buried history. The point was to start fresh and never look back.

This was not selfishness. It was a sacrifice, and a gentle rebuke to that bromide, Never Forget. To live on is to forget, at least a little. “I have a strong feeling that Hitler and all of the Nazis did not want me to have grandchildren,” Dr. Ruth told the USC Shoah Foundation. “That’s an overriding, very strong feeling of triumph…of saying, You see? With all the sadness, there is nobody that has grandchildren like mine.”

Back in those elevator days, I felt somebody else’s determined optimism was denial. When I first heard the lousy expression It’s all good, my comeback was Allow me to introduce you to the Khmer Rouge. Strung out from raising kids and a career that made me unhappy, I felt battered and brittle— a young man already made old. I had the arrogance to believe that New York City life hardened me. Here was this war orphan and her compatriots in Fort Tryon Park, demonstrating what real toughness was.

In a different moment, another friend and I stood waiting for a London bus. In front of us was a queue of biddies in weathered macs, gray hair battened down by kerchiefs to ward off the rain. “When you look at these old scrotes, remember this,” said my companion. “They made it through the Blitz.”

The oldest among us were the least psychologically thrown by the ravages of Covid, while the young and strong still struggle. Whatever their frailties, the passing generation knows a thing or two about disruption. I moved out of Dr. Ruth’s building years ago, and never saw her again. But in a month of turmoil that’s included an attempted assassination, it would be lovely to bump into her in the lift.

Dr. Ruth has four grandchildren. She was probably cradling one of them in the seat next to my inconvenienced friend. A survivor of epic loss and the ordinary pain afflicting every human heart, she found deliverance and the love of strangers in America. More than that, she survived.

Of course she smiled.

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