Ruth Linn

Ruth Linn is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, Israel (2001-2006). 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 (Linn 1989, 1996), women’s narrative of moral resistance (Linn 2002), and the representation of moral conflicts during the Holocaust in Israel's collective memory (Linn 2004).

Linn is the only Israeli scholar to have studied Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee, and to have brought his memoirs to the Israeli public (Linn 2004). 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.

Bibliography

• Linn, R. (1989). Not Shooting and Not Crying: Psychological Inquiry into Moral Disobedience. New York: Greenwood Press.
• _____ (1996). Conscience at War: the Israeli Soldier as a Moral Critic. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• _____ (2002). Mature Unwed Mothers: Narratives of Moral Resistance. New York: KluwerAcademic/Plenum Publishers.
• _____ (2004). Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

See also

• Rudolf Vrba

References

• Ruth Linn's webpage, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa.

Further reading

• Laor, Yitzhak. "Auschwitz, They Tell Me You've Become Popular", Haaretz, December 26, 2004 (a review of Linn's Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting)
• Johnson, Pat. "Israeli narrative omits Vrba", Jewish Independent, April 21, 2006.