Leslie Nguyen
Contributing Writer
Disclaimer: profane language
On Wednesday May 7, Lily Habas, painter and 75th College of Creative Studies (CCS) Senator at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), held the closing reception for her senior exhibition “Just Like Heaven.”
Walking in felt like queuing up for a concert — tense, electric, and full of anticipation. Pink spotlights highlighted punk-style posters, soft rock coursed through the room, and a ’90s-style animation flickered on the wall. Excitement buzzed all around.
An homage to the political roots of punk culture, the exhibition’s title “Just Like Heaven” doesn’t just describe the collection or a song by The Cure — it represents the cure to the artist’s abstracted emotions grappling with her othered identities: being a punk, female, pro-Palestinian Jew.
The song “Just Like Heaven,” originally her fantasy of romantic love, became something deeper for Habas. “It tells a beautiful story,” she explained. Her relationship with the song shifted as she experienced the love that was sung about. Just as The Cure’s music captures “the magic of emotion with music and sound,” Habas revealed, her paintings capture the emotional stories she can’t channel through words.
Using tarot cards as inspiration, Habas’ collection began with feminine figures from Jewish mythology. Ambiguity was painted across each facial expression, reflecting opposing portrayals of femininity in Jewish texts: stereotypes of weakness with historical representations of strength. “The Star” depicted a golem, a protector of the Jewish people. “The Moon,” a “dybbuk,” a poltergeist that possesses young women who engage in premarital sex — despite Judaism being “one of the few religions that uplifts sexuality,” Habas noted. “The Sun” represented a biblical feminine hero: Judith.
These conflicting archetypes mirrored Habas’ own journey at UCSB. “You wouldn’t recognize the person I was,” Habas reflected, “That person was incredibly insecure and worried about what other people think.”
As campus tensions rose over the Israel-Palestine war, her pro-Palestinian stance made her a target in the Jewish community. “I felt like I was being tokenized [sic] for my identity by other Jews — they were saying we got to stick with Israel, if you do anything else, you’re a traitor.”
Although she was taught that her community would always be there, the tides turned on her. “I was reckoning with feeling lost in my own community,” Habas stated.
Out of this turmoil, the character “Nice Jewish Girl” arose. Contemporary media portrays a trope of the Jewish woman: “the Jewish mother is loud, overbearing. She’s embarrassing,” Habas explained, “It’s a demeaning stereotype, and it’s crazy.” Looking at Habas’ tarot card series, this stereotype is contradicted by the feminine power prominent in the ethno-religious history. Amid the conflicting voices within her religion, Habas asked herself, “Why can’t Jewish women be nice Jewish girls?”
Wheat-pasted posters introduced “Nice Jewish Girl,” tagged with an homage to the Dead Kennedy song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” a message Habas lives by day-to-day. Starting her time in CCS with apolitical art, Habas focused on fairytale and mythological themes, but Habas proclaimed, “My heart kept pulling me towards politics; I just couldn’t not do it.”
In this process, her punk roots surfaced as her artistic driving force. “The music is like fuel. While working on all these, I would be blasting rock music. It gives you a certain adrenaline,” she said.
“Punk comes out of this massive push for social change,” Habas noted. Following the arduous battle for civil rights in the United States and growing anti-war sentiment in the ’70s, punk culture “comes from this buildup of increased depression, increased censorship, and loss of freedom for women.”
Art is inherently political, and “artists are vital to political movements,” said Habas, whose work draws on 20th-century print activism. She pointed to the iconic “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” posters as an example of mass messaging. Today, with terms like “diversity” and “queer” defunded under the Trump administration, political art helps amplify voices excluded by government-backed censorship.
By combining physical space with media, Habas believes art uplifts social justice, while also resisting erasure. Looking at the Nazis’ historical use of book burnings to control information, Habas said, “We’re not going through the same thing yet, but we’re very close.”
Today, she sees echoes of that silencing in how the U.S. government acts “in the name of Jewish safety” to justify violent actions. “Not to say I’ve felt less Jewish because of that,” Habas emphasized, “I’ve felt more Jewish because of that. I know Judaism is not a violent religion — it’s a religion of giving back.”
The concept “tikkun olam,” or “repair the world,” is core to Judaism, but tenants like these are experiencing “violation by messianic genocidal people who do not care about Judaism,” Habas stated. In an increasingly digitized world, information can disappear in seconds. Habas finds grounding in art and in physical venues, like punk spaces, havens for the survival of resistance and community.
Just as punk spaces were havens for outsiders, “Nice Jewish Girl” became Habas’s haven. The collection shifted from gritty punk into a sanctuary from the social upheaval with the creation of “Nice Jewish Girl’s” bedroom, built from pieces of her actual bedroom.
While the character offers a personal escape, the punk scene itself has faced a crisis: invasion by those sporting the aesthetic while ignoring its activist roots. In response, Habas reclaims her power as an artist: “My job is to fight this — to make fighting fascism cool again.”
In her time as CCS Senator, Habas realized she didn’t belong on the political frontlines, instead claiming her place “behind the scenes, mass producing messaging that speaks through art.”
After graduating this summer, she will continue working with activist organizations Jewish Voice for Peace and California Jewish Artists for Palestine. “I am a proud, anti-Zionist Jew. The displacement and murder of millions of Palestinian men, women, and children does not do anything for Jewish safety. It is done in the name of imperialist, settler colonialism.”
Reclaiming appropriated popular imagery, Habas’s collection rewrites the narratives forced onto popular imagery, guided by a Torah commandment that anchors her work: “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof” (“Justice, justice, you shall pursue”).