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After working in a number of positions involving sex education, family planning, and sex therapy, Westheimer found her niche when she did a guest appearance on a local radio show. The audience response was so positive that she was soon hosting her own show, Sexually Speaking. Beginning in 1980 as a fifteen-minute embellishment to the station’s schedule, it quickly expanded to an hour and finally to two hours.

Westheimer proved to have a real genius for communicating joy in human sexuality while at the same time informing her audiences about responsibility, sexually transmitted diseases, and safe sex. The diminutive woman with her appealing accent was equally successful on television. She hosted her own program—variously called Good Sex! with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, The Dr. Ruth Show, and Ask Dr. Ruth—but her national reputation came from appearances on such network programs as Nightline, CBS Evening News, the Tonight Show, and Late Night with David Letterman.

In 1983, Westheimer published her first book, Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex. She later wrote more than forty others, including her autobiographical works All in a Lifetime (1987) and Musically Speaking: A Life through Song (2003).

In 1995, Westheimer co-authored Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition, with Jonathan Mark. Drawing on traditional Judaic sources, it grounds the famous sex therapist’s philosophy in Orthodox Jewish teaching. While some have suggested that the authors ignored the darker side of the classical Jewish dialectic on the subject, it is difficult to ignore the cultural significance of both the book and Dr. Ruth.

As David Biale asked, “What does it mean for America’s best-known sex therapist to make Judaism the basis of a contemporary sex ethic? If Freud had claimed to have created the science of sexuality by destroying the ‘illusion’ of religion, Dr. Ruth reverses the course: It is precisely on the basis of religion—Judaism—that a truly healthy contemporary science of sexuality might be constructed.”

In 1991 Westheimer donned the title of “executive producer” for a documentary on Ethiopian Jews entitled Surviving Salvation. Her second PBS documentary, entitled No Missing Link, described how grandparents transmitted values, particularly religious values, during the seventy years of communism in Russia.

In 1994 Westheimer entered cyberspace with Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex on CD-ROM. Two hundred and fifty entries dealt straightforwardly with all areas of sex and sexuality. Westheimer followed it up with Sex for Dummies, in the famous series of how-to manuals. She told USA Today that her first reaction to the idea of the book was negative. “When they approached me, I said, ‘Absolutely no, I do not talk to dummies. I talk to intelligent people.’” She changed her mind, however, when she recognized the irony of the titles and their disarming appeal to a wide segment of the population. “And then I said, hold it, if I can prevent one unintended pregnancy, one person from getting AIDS, one person from getting a sexually transmitted disease, it will be worth it.”

This determinedly optimistic, affirmative, and wholesome approach left Westheimer open to criticism and satire. It is a testament to the endurance of the human spirit that someone who was exposed to the horrors of humanity and experienced great sorrow at an early age was able to look away from the darkness and toward the light. As she told a Reuters interviewer at the 1995 Frankfurt Book Fair, “I was kicked out in 1939 by being placed on a train right here in Frankfurt.... I never saw my parents again. Every time I am sad I just have to think about my five-year-old grandson. Hitler didn’t want me to have that grandson. I put the picture of my grandson in my mind and say—You see, we did triumph. So I do therapy on myself.”