	Westheimer does a standup sitting down.

Now Westheimer wants to tell us about sects

Originally published in Current, Dec. 4, 2006
By Jeremy Egner

Kent Steele, executive director of broadcasting for New York’s WNET, had only the faintest notion about who the Druze were when a producer pitched his station a project about the relatively mysterious Arab sect. He soon scheduled it anyway.

“You don’t say no to Dr. Ruth,” he says.

At 78, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the iconic sex therapist, still packs formidable charisma and persuasive enthusiasm into her 4 feet 7 inches.

“You are the first person in the world to hear that my film’s going to be shown across the nation!” she told Current last week, soon after learning her latest doc, The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strengths of the Druze, was being offered nationally by American Public Television. “Now I’m going to work on those Canadians.”

The hour-long film focuses on the Druze, a non-Jewish sect concentrated in Lebanon, Israel and thereabouts. WNET aired the film in September; APT will offer it nationally in April.

This is Westheimer’s third doc and, like its predecessors, it focuses not on the sex advice she has dispensed on talk shows for more than two decades but on family values within distinct cultures and the ways in which they endure through successive generations.

Previous public TV projects looked at family dynamics among Ethiopian Jews (Surviving Salvation) and residents of communist Russia (No Missing Link). Her next doc project will focus on Bedouin women in southern Israel.

The Druze sect is an 11th century offshoot of Islam that keeps the tenets of its faith hidden from outsiders. There are roughly 700,000 Druze, mostly in the Middle East.

They are considered Arabs but the 115,000 who live in Israel have earned acceptance and respect from government and people, primarily because, unlike other non-Jewish minorities, they perform compulsory service in the nation’s military.

“They made a blood pact in 1948 with Israel, promising to always defend it,” Westheimer says. This can include battling brethren who live in and fight for other Middle Eastern nations such as Lebanon or Syria, she says.

“It’s a very difficult task of having to be in military and still remain Druze,” she says.

Westheimer herself is no stranger to combat. As a teenager in Palestine, she trained as a sniper with the Jewish underground group Haganah and was wounded during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

“I can still put five bullets in a tight circle if a journalist writes bad things about me,” she said.

With involvement in the military, young Druze men are also exposed to the temptations and desires of modern Israel.

The Olive and the Tree incorporates interviews with Druze mothers, grandparents, soldiers and sons that explore the community’s fears about encroaching influences of Western culture while trying to get at the “secret strength” that has kept the tiny sect from being assimilated into modern Israeli life.

The culture has endured nearly 1,000 years even though the only way to become a Druze is to be born into the community, and anyone who marries outside the culture must leave it.

For centuries it was persecution from outsiders that worked to keep the Druze banded together, says Pierre Lehu, a spokesman for Westheimer. “The ironic thing is, now that they’re living freely amongst Western culture, that acceptance may end up doing more damage than the persecution did to the Druze way of life,” he says.

“It’s a good story, and Dr. Ruth is an interesting storyteller,” Steele said. “It’s almost like a historical travelogue.”

Westheimer’s interest in the strength of families actually predates her sex studies. She earned a doctorate in interdisciplinary family studies and still teaches seminars on related subjects at Princeton and Yale.

“It’s nice to be Dr. Ruth because they pick me up and bring me back so I don’t have to carry my books on the subway,” she says.

She’s also branched out in recent years into family TV, instructing kids on the joy of reading as Dr. Wordheimer on PBS’s Between the Lions.

Sex, meanwhile, is still her business, and business is good. The third edition of her Sex for Dummies came out last month, and she still offers sex and relationship counseling at her New York office.

While she doesn’t ask her documentary subjects about their sex lives, she says, her reputation does come in useful when she approaches potential funders for her projects.

“I promise anyone who gives me money good sex for the rest of their lives,” she said.

Who could say no to that?