Ask Dr. Ruth
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Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A Holocaust orphan becomes America's sex therapist at 4 foot 7; the argument that frankness is a form of kindness.
Ask Dr. Ruth, directed by Ryan White, follows Ruth Westheimer as she approaches her ninetieth birthday in 2018, on a schedule that would tire someone half her age: college courses, books, a column, speeches, radio and television. In between, it tells her life in her own words and in animation drawn from her diaries and her parents' letters.
She was born Karola Siegel in 1928 and grew up in Frankfurt, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. In 1939, after Kristallnacht, her mother and grandmother put the ten-year-old on a Kindertransport to Switzerland, where she spent the war in a children's home, reading books a boyfriend slipped her. Her parents' letters stopped in 1941; they were killed. She calls herself not a survivor but an orphan of the Holocaust. In Palestine she trained as a sniper in the Haganah and was badly wounded by a shell. She studied in Paris, reached the United States in 1956, married three times, lastly to Manfred Westheimer, who died in 1997, and raised two children. Work at Planned Parenthood and a doctorate led to a fifteen-minute midnight call-in show on New York radio, Sexually Speaking. By the late 1980s Dr Ruth, four foot seven with a thick German accent, was a household name, talking plainly about masturbation, orgasm and gay sex, and early in the AIDS epidemic she spoke out against homophobic myths.
Now she visits her first boyfriend, Walter, also a Kindertransport child, and they sing together. In Israel she searches a Holocaust archive for word of her parents. At the kitchen table her granddaughter is dismayed that she will not call herself a feminist; Ruth agrees with every aim, says she is too square for the word and that nobody has to burn a bra, and is argued round to a feminist, if not a radical one. The film closes on her ninetieth birthday celebration. She died in July 2024, aged 96.
Starring
Ruth WestheimerHerself
The sex therapist, nearly ninety, who retells her life from Frankfurt to fame while keeping up a punishing schedule.
Joel WestheimerHimself
Ruth's son, who can barely remember her speaking about her parents' deaths unless he or his sister asked.
Leora EinlegerHerself
Ruth's granddaughter, who argues with her at the kitchen table over why she will not call herself a feminist.
Why it matters
Ask Dr. Ruth is a portrait of the woman who made plain talk about sex ordinary on American radio and television, and it asks where that plainness came from. The film's answer is a childhood cut in two: a ten-year-old put on a train by her family, who never saw her parents again, and who insists on being called not a survivor but an orphan of the Holocaust. It does not claim that the loss explains the career, and she does not either. What it shows is a woman who treated pleasure as something people were owed and embarrassment as something to be laughed out of the room, at a time when that took nerve, and who spoke up against homophobic myths in the early years of AIDS. Her resistance to the word feminist, argued out with her granddaughter, ends in compromise: a feminist, she allows, just not a radical one. She seems to prefer the work to the label.