Ruth Linn


Ruth Linn is an Israeli academic and professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development at the University of Haifa, where she has taught since 1982. She served as dean of the Faculty of Education from 2001 to 2006. Specializing in moral psychology, Linn has written about resistance to authority, including conscientious objection; women and moral resistance; and the representation, in Israel's collective memory, of moral conflicts during the Holocaust.
Linn is the author of five books, including Not Shooting and Not Crying: Psychological Inquiry into Moral Disobedience ; Conscience at War: the Israeli Soldier as a Moral Critic ; Mature Unwed Mothers: Narratives of Moral Resistance ; and Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting.

Education

Born in Israel, Linn attended the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, after which she was conscripted, in 1968 aged 18, into the Israel Defence Forces. She obtained her doctorate in education from Boston University in 1981.

Career

After receiving her doctorate, Linn taught in the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa from 1982, and from 2001 to 2006 served as its dean. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Maryland University, and the University of British Columbia.
The author of Escaping Auschwitz, a book about the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, Linn arranged for the University of Haifa to award Vrba an honorary doctorate in 1998, in recognition of his escape and his contribution to Holocaust education. The award ceremony coincided with the first publication in Hebrew of his memoirs and the Vrba–Wetzler report by Haifa University Press.

Awards

Linn was awarded the Erikson Award by the International Society of Political Psychology in 1990 for her work on Israeli soldiers and conscientious objection.

Personal life

Linn is married with three children.

Selected works