Ruth Linn

Who is Ruth Linn?

Ruth Linn is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is an expert in the field of moral psychology, and her research focuses on issues associated with resistance to authority. Her books and numerous articles focus on selective conscientious objection, women’s narrative of moral resistance, and the representation of moral conflicts during the Holocaust in Israel's collective memory.

Linn is the only Israeli scholar to have studied Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee, and to have brought his memoirs to the Israeli public. In 1998, she succeeded in convincing the University of Haifa to award Vrba an honorary doctorate in recognition of his escape and his contribution to Holocaust education. The award ceremony coincided with the first publication of his book in Hebrew by the Haifa University Press, after it was rejected by Yad Vashem.

Linn was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Maryland University, National Institute of Mental Health and the University of British Columbia. She is a winner of the Erikson Prize of the International Society of Political Psychology for her pioneering studies on Israeli soldiers who assumed a position of selective conscientious objectors during wartime. She obtained her doctorate from Boston University in 1981.