Aliza Luft

Aliza Luft is an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. She studies how individuals and institutions make moral and political decisions during periods of violence and examines how victimized populations respond. Her research centers on genocide and mass atrocity, particularly the Holocaust in France and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and on how these events continue to shape conflict and social division today. Across these cases, she traces how violence transforms moral judgment, identity, and social boundaries.

Luft is Interim Director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, and serves on the steering committee of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. She is the author of “Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust” (Harvard University Press), and numerous scholarly articles, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.