She was the daughter of Russian and Romanian immigrants, Matilda and Emanuel Somerfeld, Esther worked her way through school during the 1920s as a secretary and as an editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[citation needed] While she planned to become a social worker, Somerfeld-Ziskind changed her mind to pursue pre-med at the University of Chicago.

[citation needed] She and her husband, Eugene Ziskind, started their own small psychiatric practice on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles during the Depression.

Later in life, Somerfeld-Ziskind worked extensively as a faculty member of the medical school at the University of Southern California, teaching child psychiatry, group therapy, and psychopathology.

[1] Throughout her career, Somerfeld-Ziskind and her husband worked together to research the use of insulin, lithium, and electroconvulsive therapy to treat psychiatric disorders.

Some of these included: In 1931, Somerfeld-Ziskind earned an award for her research article titled "Meningeal Allergy in Tuberculosis" by the California Medical Association.

Until the last year of her life, she wrote book reviews for the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, analyzing texts of 1,000 pages or more.