[5] Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel, on June 4, 1928, in the small village of Wiesenfeld (now part of Karlstadt am Main), in Germany.

[12][13][14] She cried while her father was taken away by Gestapo men who loaded him on a truck, while her grandmother handed the Nazis money, pleading, "Take good care of my son.

"[7] After World War II ended, Westheimer decided to immigrate to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine at 16 years of age.

Westheimer joined the Haganah Jewish Zionist underground paramilitary organization (later, the Israel Defense Forces) in Jerusalem.

[33] In 1948, on her 20th birthday, Westheimer was seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during a mortar fire attack on Jerusalem during the 1947–1949 Palestine war; the explosion killed two girls who were right next to her.

[34][30][26] Temporarily paralyzed and with two injured feet (one missing a top portion), she spent months in a recuperative ward before walking again.

[26][38] In 1950, at the age of 22, Westheimer married and moved to France with her first husband, David Bar-Haim, an Israeli soldier who had been accepted to medical school in Paris.

[11][39][25] There, she studied psychology under psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), and earned an undergraduate degree despite not having had a high school education[40][41][42] and supported herself by teaching kindergarten.

[57][58] After receiving her doctorate, Westheimer briefly worked for Planned Parenthood in Harlem training women to teach sex education, and this experience encouraged her to continue studying human sexuality.

Westheimer's media career began in 1980 when she was 52 years old, and her radio show, Sexually Speaking, debuted on WYNY-FM in New York City.

[44][11][78] She was offered the opportunity after she gave a lecture to New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming to help deal with issues of contraception and unwanted pregnancies.

Betty Elam, the community affairs manager at WYNY, was impressed with her talk and offered Westheimer $25 per week to make Sexually Speaking, which started as a 15-minute show airing every Sunday at midnight, which was historically a dead time.

[79][80] By 1981, as the show attracted 250,000 listeners every week despite the network not doing any promotion for it—growing simply by word of mouth—it was extended to be one hour long on Sunday nights, starting at 10 pm.

[84] Singer Pattie Brooks recorded a song as an ode to her, "Dr. Ruth," with a trendy, dance-rock tinged, high pressure beat.

[62] That year she also appeared as an actress in the French romantic comedy film Une Femme ou Deux (One Woman or Two), starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver, playing the part of a wealthy philanthropist.

[95][96][97] In 1987, she began a separate half-hour syndicated series on many broadcast stations called Ask Dr. Ruth, which was co-hosted by Larry Angelo.

[105][106][107] In 1990, Westheimer starred in an ABC sitcom pilot, Dr. Ruth's House, which aired as a one-time special in June of that year.

"[111] In 1994, she appeared in a computer game, an interactive CD-ROM adaptation of Dr. Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex released for Windows and a Philips CD-i.

[127] Between 2001 and 2007, Westheimer made regular appearances on the PBS children's television series Between the Lions as "Dr. Ruth Wordheimer" in a spoof of her therapist role, in which she helps anxious readers and spellers overcome their fear of long words.

In January 2009, the 55th anniversary issue of Playboy magazine included Westheimer as #13 in a list of the 55 most important people in sex from the past 55 years.

Her studies in this field included the Ethiopian Jews, Papua New Guinea's Trobriand Islanders, and the Druze, a sect originating from Shia Islam now residing in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.

[140][141] She was also the Executive Producer for PBS documentaries Surviving Salvation and No Missing Link, Shifting Sands: Bedouin Women at the Crossroads, and The Unknown Face of Islam (on the Circassians).

In October 2013 the one-woman play Becoming Dr. Ruth, written by Mark St. Germain and directed by Julianne Boyd and set in 1997, opened Off Broadway at the Westside Theatre.

[143] The play showcased the sex therapist's life from fleeing the Nazis in the Kindertransport and joining the Haganah in Jerusalem as a scout and sniper, to her struggles to succeed as a single mother coming to the United States.

[146] In 2019, the documentary Ask Dr. Ruth directed by Ryan White was in theaters, and was made available on Hulu, as she approached her 90th birthday.

"[149][150] Having previously avoided discussing her early years and how the Holocaust affected her family and herself, Westheimer believed that current events made it necessary for her to "stand up and be counted".

[88] Westheimer was named 1983 Jewish Woman of Achievement by a consortium of organizations connected with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York, received the 1986 Mayor's Liberty Award from New York City Mayor Ed Koch, and was given the 1987 Motion Picture Theater Bookers Association Star of Tomorrow Award.

[165] When Diane Sawyer, interviewing the couple for the TV show 60 Minutes asked her husband about their sex life, he answered, "The shoemaker's children have no shoes.

[54] She had two children: Dr. Miriam Yael Westheimer, an educator, author, and chief program officer of HIPPY International, which develops early childhood education and literacy programs,[166] and who lived in Israel for six years and later married Joel Henry Einleger, and Joel Westheimer, a professor at the University of Ottawa; she had four grandchildren.

[170] In her final years, Westheimer lived in the cluttered three-bedroom apartment on 190th Street "in Washington Heights where she raised her two children and became famous, in that order".