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When Dr. Ruth Westheimer was just 9 years old, her father was taken away by the Gestapo. It was a week after Kristallnacht. Her mother was able to get her to safety in Switzerland a year later, but both of her parents were murdered in the Holocaust. Her father died at Auschwitz and there is no record of what happened to her mother.
Also, while you would never have expected this of her, she was trained as a sniper in the Israeli military (she never saw combat).
From Wikipedia:
Of this experience, she said, "I never killed anybody, but I know how to throw hand grenades and shoot."[28] She became an ace sniper, and learned to assemble a rifle in the dark.[22][12] When she was 90 years old, she demonstrated that she was still able to put together a Sten gun with her eyes closed.[29]
(Sorry, there does not appear to be video of that bit at the end.)
Yes, she was a Zionist, but I can't really blame her after what she went through and I never heard her advocate for any sort of mistreatment of Palestinians.
More importantly, she helped destigmatize sex in America and gave people a way to ask very frank sexual questions and get professional advice, rather than from Penthouse Forum or whatever. It helped that she didn't in any way fit into society's beauty standards for a woman- it showed that any kind of person could have an active and fulfilling sex life. She was also a very early advocate for AIDS research and was a major advocate for legalized abortion.
So she was a complicated person with a tragic past, but I think she left the world in a better place and I am glad she did so.
