Ruth Linn

Ruth Linn is a professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development at the University of Haifa.

Specializing in moral psychology, she has focused on moral disobedience, including resistance to authority.

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 (EdD) from Boston University in 1981.

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 held visiting scholarships at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, the University of British Columbia, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Linn is the author of five books, including Not Shooting and Not Crying: Psychological Inquiry into Moral Disobedience (1989); Conscience at War: the Israeli Soldier as a Moral Critic (1996); and Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting (2004).

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

Linn is married with three children.

In 1998, Linn arranged for the University of Haifa to award an honorary doctorate to Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1944, in recognition of his escape and his contribution to Holocaust education.

She also arranged for the University of Haifa Press to publish Vrba's memoirs and the Vrba–Wetzler report in Hebrew.

Linn subsequently wrote Escaping Auschwitz (2004), a book about Vrba.