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Luft is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She studies how ordinary people make decisions during war and genocide: why some participate in violence, why others resist, and why many look away. Her research shows that these choices turn less on hatred or ideology than we tend to assume and more on how people classify one another, how those classifications shift under extreme pressure, and how the relationships people are embedded in shape what they ultimately do. Drawing on archives, interviews, and experiments, she develops testable theories of culture, morality, identity, and political violence — and of the conditions under which people refuse to do harm.
Her book, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews during the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2026), shows how France's most influential bishops moved from condemning Nazism to reassuring Jewish leaders of a protection they never delivered, demonstrating how genocide unfolds through quiet capitulations and broken promises as much as through spectacular violence. Her award-winning research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, European Journal of Sociology, Social Science History, and other journals, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.