The news of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s death on July 12^th was at once anticipated and surprising: anticipated because she was 96 years old and yet surprising because she had a zest for life and indefatigable spirit that made her appear younger than her years and unstoppable.

I’d known her since spring 1994, when I was the new promotion manager at Continuum Publishing Company, which had initiated a line of scholarly books on sexology for the popular market. Continuum’s CEO, Werner Mark Linz, a suave German with a knack for making the serious splashy (and vice versa), knew a volume with her name in the title would give Continuum and the discipline much-needed visibility. So, we acquired Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex, and it was my task to work with her to promote the thing.

 I recall sitting nervously in Continuum’s conference room when I heard a commotion and Dr. Ruth burst in and immediately started talking: at least, that’s how I remember it. She went straight to the telephone and started dialing somebody to ask him to do something for her. She then spent the next several minutes issuing instructions over the phone.

This, I learned, was characteristic of Dr. Ruth: she could walk into any room and get anyone to do anything for her, without apparent hesitation or resentment on their behalf. That ability to bend any situation to your advantage was a function of her incongruities: her diminutive size combined with her thick German-accented English, and her well-known affect of looking like a Jewish grandmother and speaking with absolute frankness about sex. To a degree, I found the shtick grating and decided not to indulge it. It turned out, I didn’t have to, because Ruth eventually finished her calls, and as she and I sat in the conference room, looked at me and said quietly, “It took me years to be able to do that.”

That simple observation marked the beginning of our two-decade relationship, one that resulted in three books and many moments with this remarkable woman. For me, she was Karola Ruth Siegel, who at ten years old in 1938 had joined the kindertransport out of Frankfurt into Switzerland and whose entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. She was Ruth Siegel, who emigrated to Palestine, learned to become a sniper, and narrowly escaped death during Israel’s war of independence. And she was Ruth Westheimer, the educator and close listener, who pieced together a personality that refused to be ignored, underestimated, or taken for granted.

We knew each other through books. As Ruth’s extensive list of publications attests, she loved producing them. Each Book Expo America, you’d hear her rasping voice and soon Ruth, surrounded by attendants, would appear. She’d grasp you by the arm or hand, and introduce you to her latest, slightly stunned, publisher. Ever present was her courtly and patient righthand man (and ghostwriter), Pierre Lehu: as undemonstrative and reticent as Ruth was expressive and direct. Ruth always had one or more projects on the go, persuading publishers of all kinds and interests to produce yet one more variation of Dr. Ruth Says Something About Sex.

My Continuum colleague Gene Gollogly and I left the company in 1999 to start our own concern, Lantern Books. But it was only a matter of time that Ruth would find us. We weren’t particularly interested in her books about sex, and so it was we published The Olive and the Tree: The Secret Strength of the Druze in 2007; Shifting Sands: Bedouin Women at the Crossroads in 2009; and The Unknown Face of Islam: Circassians in Israel in 2015. All three accompanied documentaries made by Israeli filmmaker and anthropologist Gil Sedan.

Each work examined the lives of minority groups in Israel. For the Druze, the challenges were not only being Muslims in a Jewish state, but in practicing a form of Islam that some Sunnis considered heretical. Self-identified Druze also spanned Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, and it was hard to hold the community together across borders. The authors discovered the Druze were disproportionately represented in the Israeli armed forces, especially the Airforce—a commitment to Israel that I think Ruth found very moving.

For the Bedouin, whom Ruth interviewed for Shifting Sands, the challenge was remaining nomadic pastoralists in an agrarian economy, especially as the government was pressuring them to settle in state-sanctioned townships. Ruth coaxed the women to describe how they negotiated the polygamous, patriarchal Bedouin society, and how they retained or adapted their culture in a modern, secular society. The Circassians, like the Druze, practice an esoteric form of Islam, and their challenge involved maintaining cultural norms under the pressures of contemporary life in Israel.

It perhaps goes without saying the books didn’t sell well. As the obituaries and headlines have demonstrated, it’s hard—even for someone as media savvy as Dr. Ruth—to escape a public identity that’s based on an oxymoronic perception: a grandmother whose frankness makes you blush. The trilogy showed Ruth as a much more multi-dimensional reporter and observer. The Druze, Bedouin, and Circassians were minorities in a country that was itself an outlier in the Middle East; their identities were under threat not only from modernity, secularism, and the schisms of the region, but from hostile forces—both inside and outside Israel. Their presence in Israel gave the lie to those (again both insiders and outsiders) who believed the nation was—or should be—homogenous and ethnocentric. As Ruth showed and demonstrated in these books: it (and she) contained multitudes.

The last time I spoke to Ruth it was to break the news that Gene Gollogly, our friend and colleague, had died. Like Ruth, Gene was an optimist and full of life; like her, he loved publishing. As I told her he’d gone, I once again heard the reflective and sensitive woman who’d taken years to create the Dr. Ruth who’d walked into Continuum’s conference room. I’m grateful that is my first, as well as last, memory of her.