Held on April 12, 2018
Part of the Drs. Bebe and Owen Bernstein Lecture Series
Prominent scholar and UCLA faculty member Dr. Aliza Luft discusses her research on rescue behavior during mass atrocities and genocide. Her presentation focuses on decision-making in violent contexts and how people shift stances from support for state violence to resistance over time. Luft draws on case studies from her research in France, where people were both complicit in genocide and resistant to it at alternate moments in time. She will discuss the role of Catholic bishops – a highly visible, majority population in France, and their activism which took place in large cities where they were under heavy watch by Vichy and the Nazis. Reflecting on the KHC exhibit, Conspiracy of Goodness, she will show the distinctions from that of Le Chambon, where a minority group of protestants engaged in rescue behaviors far from the center of the regime’s activities.
Dr. Aliza Luft is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines the fluctuating relationships between social identity, ideology, and interpersonal, socio-political action in contexts marked by war and violence. Dr. Luft’s book, Sacred Treason: Race, Religion, and The Holocaust in France, is currently under contract with Harvard University Press. Another book, the second Handbook of The Sociology of Morality, is under contract with Springer (co-authored with Shai Dromi and Steve Hitlin). Her research has appeared in Political Power & Social Theory; Qualitative Sociology; Sociological Theory; Socius; European Journal of Sociology, and several other journals and edited volumes. She has also published numerous op-Eds and interviews in The Washington Post; New Yorker; LA Times; NY Times, and elsewhere. Prior to UCLA, she worked in various capacities for USAID, United Nations CTED, Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies, and Facing History & Ourselves.
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