The mural went up in a day in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. By Thursday morning, Los Angeles Jews who saw it expressed outrage, calling it hateful and incendiary. By Thursday evening at 9 p.m., it was obliterated by a thick coat of grey paint, only the faint lines of the original drawing visible. Meanwhile, the artist who drew it told me he is the son of a Jewish father who didn’t mean to offend, just start a conversation.
Welcome to the bizarro world of antisemitism, circa 2026.
The 40-foot by 12-foot mural depicted Jews dancing on caskets and holding missiles above the heads of grieving mothers, rows of tanks and a sign that read: “Buy More Things,” alongside images of diamonds and televisions.
One section depicted parents who appear to be Muslim holding their children and weeping. Five bodies of children were laid out on an altar-like table beside a figure with a yarmulke holding a missile. As your eyes moved to the left, there was a dollar sign and the words, “Freedom has Never Been Free.”
The piece, drawn in chalk against painted slate on a long panel of plywood construction fencing, combined the graphic scope and drama of Picasso’s “Guernica” with antisemitic caricatures straight out of the pre-World War II Nazi periodical Der Sturmer.
I had seen photos and videos of the mural, located at 5376 Wilshire Blvd. between Cloverdale Street and S. Detroit Street next to The Heart LA Church and just a few blocks from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. My wife, Rabbi Naomi Levy, received the video via an urgent text message on Thursday from a congregant who came across it on her morning walk.
The “grotesque expressions on their faces, surrounded by images of war/suffering/greed,” the congregant wrote, play into “the worst antisemitic propaganda imagery.”
She wasn’t wrong. The congregant reported the mural to the city’s 311 complaint line. The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles confirmed it also fielded complaints.
The location is just over a mile east of the headquarters of the city’s Jewish federation and Shalhevet, an Orthodox Jewish high school.
The mural wasn’t signed by the artist, but a phone number appeared in the same chalk on an adjoining panel. David Sabastian, long a fixture in the L.A. fashion, music and art scene, posts the same phone number on his Instagram account bio.
So I called him.
“Right now there’s people who are offended by you simply saying ‘Free Palestine’,” he told me. “So can somebody be offended? Hell yeah! I offend people when I go to Whole Foods sometimes and I’m like wearing shorts. People get offended for everything.”
Sabastian said he didn’t see the mural as antisemitic, or even that political.
“I’m not some radical pro-Palestine or pro-anything,” he said. “I’m an artist who simply illustrates my human experience.”
Sabastian told me he likes art that provokes conversation and stands for something. That’s one way to describe the mural. Another is that it crosses the line to hate.
“That would be a vast exaggeration and an irresponsible one,” he said. “But it is art. It could be interpreted in many ways, but I don’t think that way.”
When I pointed out that Jews I spoke with took offense, he told me he didn’t see it as representing all Jews.
“My father was a Hasidic rabbi,” he said.
Sabastian’s given name is David Miklatski. A 2016 profile of Sabastian in the L.A. Weekly reported that his father was a gallery owner who had recently died. Sabastian told me his father had a brief liaison with his mother, who lived in Watts. Then his father became very religious. He led a synagogue in the Pico-Robertson district – Sabastian couldn’t recall the name – and then moved to Israel.
“That story goes deep,” said Sabastian, who is in his late 30s. “He pretty much disowned me when I was a child.”
I told him there was a long history of antisemitic cartoons fueling hate and violence, and many people would see what he drew as offensive, just as they would stereotypical images of Blacks or Latinos. What does he see as the line between symbolism and vilification?
He answered me with a question of his own.
“I’ve lived the Black experience growing up in Los Angeles, right?” he said. “If I wanted to paint a picture that kind of dealt with that human experience of racism, and I chose to include a white person in it, am I villainizing all white people?”
I brought up George Floyd. The images that spread after his murder, a white foot or a white hand on Floyd’s neck, were clearly about the officers who killed him. They weren’t an indictment of all white people.
But his mural, I said, reads as an indictment of all Jews when it’s the Israeli army fighting the war.
“If you know who are murdering and slaughtering Palestinians, is it Mexicans? Is it Chinese?” he said. “It’s the Israeli army. Do the majority of them happen to be Jewish? Sure. So that’s just the drawing. If it was Black people doing it, then I would draw Black people or whatever the case may be. It’s simply like a political cartoon.”
Of course, it’s not so simple, given the way antisemitic images get weaponized to incite violence against Jews.
In our conversation, Sabastian himself wasn’t sure who he was targeting. He called the dancing figures “Jews,” not “the Israeli army.” Then, defending the piece, he said he’s drawing “the Israeli army” and that most of them “happen to be Jewish.” That shift from Israeli army to Jews and back is the exact line that is so easily blurred when criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
If that’s a matter of interpretation, it’s clear from the comments in Sabastian’s Instagram post of the mural how others read the artwork, which he titled, “Palestina.”
“You forgot to put them on there the ancient families that pull the strings while everyone fights on religion color or where they were born,” wrote one commenter.
“Now do a star of David symbol with a swatzika [sic] and a heart,” read another, followed by laughing emojis.
The social media popularity the mural had already garnered – more than 2,000 likes shortly after he posted it – would seem to complicate any attempt to address it. But by Thursday night, it was gone. Around 9 p.m., I drove by, parked and touched my fingers to the wood that had displayed the mural. My fingertips turned wet with dark gray paint.
So far no word on who or what caused its erasure. But the saga of Sabastian’s fleeting mural remains a lesson in how much of antisemitism these days comes down to a judgment call, especially when it comes to the line between criticizing the government of Israel and attacking all Jews. This mural, even if Sabastian didn’t intend for it to endanger Jews, wasn’t a close call. It put Jews in the no-win position of living with a work in their neighborhood that regurgitates and broadcasts age-old antisemitic tropes, or being seen as the enemies of artistic freedom.
It’s not a simple problem. Just consider the rapper Macklemore – who received massive support and attention for saying “Free Palestine” at an Ed Sheeran concert. Macklemore, by the way, follows Sabastian on Instagram. Θ
Rob Eshman is a senior columnist for the Forward.
