[play Michelle]
I’ve never had the slightest interest in learning French – the spelling alone is enough to put me off, there is no need for all those silent “e”s and “u”s – but this song makes me want to brush up on the language of CROISSANTS and FROMAGE just so I can sing along. Of course, after learning French, I’d also have to learn to sing, because those are some seriously impressive vocal stylings, but hey – one thing at a time.
For those of you who haven’t jammed out to this banger and are like why haven’t I heard this on the radio yet, don’t worry. This may never make it to North American radio – but it is already a staple at Jewish celebrations around the world. Lemme explain.
Look, as an American – I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot! I’m fully aware that the rest of the world doesn’t yet understand some of our brilliant innovations. Like our units of measurement, which looked at the metric system’s precision and logic and went ok, but what about measuring distance using the average length of the human foot?
But if you ask me, the most American thing about us is that we would never in a million years participate in a continent-wide singing competition whose aesthetic is best described as glitter and kitsch.
Our friends across the Atlantic, however, LOVE glitter and kitsch. Once a year, most of Europe – plus a number of non-European countries, which we’ll talk about – get together for a week-long festival of song, camp, and ridiculous outfits. Eurovision is the longest-running international televised music competition in history, and it celebrates the continent’s diversity with some over-the-top pageantry that makes your average drag queen look demure.
It’s fun, it’s kitschy, and the spectacle is the point.
Well, technically, the initial point was to unify and maybe even heal Europe after the devastation of World World II. Details, details. These days, plenty of countries participate that did not even exist after World War II.
Including some that aren’t even in Europe!
Like… Israel, which has participated in the contest since 1973, coming in first on four separate occasions.
The Jewish state’s participation in Eurovision hasn’t always been welcomed or smooth, and since October 7th, the controversy has only grown stormier. But despite boycotts and protests, despite the online hate and the in-person security threats, Israel continues to send performers to Eurovision to represent the Jewish state.
And in this two-part series, we’re gonna talk about why. Yup, that’s right, this is another two-parter. Man, I love these. There are just so many questions to answer! Like:
Why does Israel continue to participate in Eurovision, a contest dedicated to unifying a different continent? For those keeping score, Israel is NOT in Europe.
Does the Jewish state’s performance in Eurovision change the way the country is perceived – whether by others or by itself? More to the point: does Eurovision, and other events like it, even really matter?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have been waiting five years to talk about this, because – fun fact about me – I LOVE EUROVISION. I love the pomp, the spectacle, the ridiculousness. I love the coordinated dances and elaborate stage sets and the over-the-top costumes.
But I also love Eurovision for a slightly more on-brand reason: it, too, is history. Glittery, sequined history. True, not the kind of history you’d find in a textbook, at least not the kind my high school used. But the contest does reflect the world’s changing cultural mores – as well as Israel’s role in those changes.
And, as we’ve said one, or two, or 500 times already on this show: the story of the Jewish state is so much deeper and richer than its history of Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli or Iranian-Israeli conflict. Yes, conflict sadly animates much of Israel’s story, including its participation in Eurovision. But it’s not the whole story. And it’s my hope that showcasing different facets of Israeli culture will add new dimensions to your understanding of the Jewish state.
So put on your feather boa and knee-high stiletto boots, (you don’t have to,) temporarily erase the concept of good taste from your brain, and let’s dive into the complicated, occasionally tragic, and often delightful story of Israel’s participation in Eurovision.
This week, we’ll talk about why a country in southwest Asia even participates in Eurovision. We’ll start with Israel’s very first performance all the way up to the country’s third groundbreaking win in 1998. Next week, in Part II, we’ll explore how Israel’s attitude towards Eurovision changed over the years – and why it remains so important to Israelis and Diaspora Jews, even as other European countries boycott.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We gotta start at the beginning. And like all good stories, this one starts with the inexplicable reach of the European Broadcasting Union.
Pop quiz: which of the following countries’ broadcast organizations are members of the European Broadcasting Union?
A: The UK
B: Morocco
C: Israel
D: Libya
E: All of the above
If you guessed E, congratulations, you’re very good at context clues.
If you guessed A and are like, yo, what gives, only the UK is actually in Europe, well, you’re right about that, even though many Brits view themselves more as British than European. But it turns out geography or cultural identity is less relevant to EBU membership than invisible factors like radio frequencies, transmission coordination, and satellite coverage. In short: broadcasters in Africa and Asia have been eligible to join the European Broadcasting Union since its inception in 1950.
Nine years after Israel’s founding, the Israel Broadcasting Authority joined the EBU – just in time for the second-ever Eurovision song contest. But Israel couldn’t participate in Eurovision in 1957, because the country had (a) no money and (b) NO TELEVISION. It’s true: the Israel Broadcasting Authority was radio-only til 1965. (Nerd corner alert: when TV finally came to Israel in 1965, it debuted with a single channel that focused mainly on educational broadcasts. No wonder early Israelis built so much infrastructure in such a short time. There was, quite simply, nothing else to do.)
By 1972, however, the landscape had changed.
When the wildly popular Israeli singer Ilanit traveled to Germany to record an album, her German producer suggested she enter the Eurovision song contest – as Germany’s representative. It was a huge opportunity for Israeli music to break out into an international market, and Ilanit was intrigued. But when she looked at the participation requirements, she realized that as a member of the EBU, the Israel Broadcasting Authority was eligible to participate in the song contest. In fact, every year since 1957, the European Broadcasting Union had been sending the Israelis a very nice formal invitation to participate in Eurovision, and every single year, the IBA ignored them, for the simple reason that there was just no money in the budget for such things.
So Ilanit and her band decided to raise the money themselves, paying for their tickets by appearing on the cover of an Israeli music magazine holding a bag printed with the logo of a local travel agency.
And that is how Israel made its debut at Eurovision, eighteen years after the inaugural competition.
It would be great for the story if Ilanit had won the contest her first time out of the gate. She didn’t. But her performance did break a record, coming in fourth – the best showing for a debut country since 1957 – with the love song Ey Sham, or Somewhere, [insert clip].
Somewhere – there we’ll find the garden together
The garden of love
There – there I heard a sweet old melody
There – there is a moon every night
There – there we’ll find the garden together
The garden of love
It was a purposely upbeat, hopeful song for a less-than-upbeat, hopeful nation.
Just a few months before Ilanit flew to Luxembourg, a different group of Israelis had arrived in Europe for an international competition. The Israeli athletes who came to compete in the 1972 Munich Olympics did end up making headlines, but not for the reasons they had hoped. Instead, they earned the heartbreaking distinction of being kidnapped, held hostage, and murdered on live TV. (For more details about this tragedy, check out the link in the show notes.)
To say Ilanit’s security was tight in the aftermath of Munich would be an understatement. She didn’t move without a posse of bodyguards and police officers, and rumors swirled that the singer was wearing a bulletproof vest under her dress. (Ilanit later debunked that, but let’s face it: it’s not like it was an outlandish rumor.) Meanwhile, the audience was warned not to stand up during the performance unless they wanted to get shot.
Yikes.
But you’d never know any of this from the performance. She belted out the entire song with an unwavering smile, clearly overjoyed. It was a triumphant debut for a controversial contestant.
As the Israeli delegate, Ilanit was well aware that she was acting as an ambassador for a nation that usually made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In April of 1973, Israel’s global reputation was still relatively strong; just a few months before the Yom Kippur War, the country was still riding the high of its miraculous victory in the Six Day War. For so many Europeans, the country represented a feel-good success story: a scrappy underdog who repeatedly defied the odds, whether on the battlefield or a stage. Much later, Ilanit reflected:
“When I was in the Eurovision in ’73, they loved Israel so much, they praised us so much, something that today doesn’t happen, they don’t love us internationally.”
Of course, not everyone was heaping praise on the Jewish state.
The Arab world reacted predictably to Israel’s inclusion in the contest. Six years after the Khartoum resolution – in which the members of the Arab League vowed there would be no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiation with Israel – the Arab world was holding fast to its economic, military, and cultural boycott of the Jewish state.
Which got pretty awkward when Israel won, five years after its debut.
[insert clip – start at 37ish seconds]
1978 was a huge year for Israel.
That September, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords that would form the basis for the lasting peace treaty between the two sworn enemies. But even more importantly, it was the year of Israel’s first Eurovision win. The disco banger A-Ba-Ni-B sounds like nonsense.
But examine the chorus carefully, and the nonsense syllables might start to make sense:
Abanibi obohebev
Abanibi obohebev obotabach
You’ve probably noticed the repetition of the “b” sound. That’s not an accident: The chorus was written in Israel’s version of Pig Latin. (Side note about me: I HATE PIG LATIN. In high school, my best friends tortured me by speaking Pig Latin to each other, and I’m still not over it.) So Israel’s version, which is called Sfat HaBet, or “B Language,” is TRIGGERING to me!
It’s a simple formula: Sfat HaBet inserts a “b” sound after every syllable.
So Shalom becomes sha-ba-lo-bom. And I love you, “ani ohev otach” becomes a-ba-ni-bi oh-bo-he-bev oh-bo-to-bach.
Honestly, it kind of makes my head hurt. In fact, Sfat HaBet was so difficult for non-Hebrew speakers that some took to singing I wanna be a polar bear, which, as far as misheard lyrics go, is pretty fun.
Personally, I have a soft spot for A-Ba-Ni-Bi. I first heard it performed by an Australian Jewish high school choir from Moriah College who had come to visit Beth Tfiloh, the Jewish high school I went to in Baltimore. I was like, that is not a language I have ever heard. Is that how they speak in Australia?!
Language confusion aside, the crowd loved it. It helped that the song was a banger: upbeat and theatrical, with a slow interlude that allowed lead vocalist Izhar Cohen to show off his vocal chops. And then there were the coordinated dance moves and the matching, glittery outfits.
Cohen and his band, Alphabeta, were young, attractive, exuberant – and maybe, to the largely European crowd, even a little exotic. Previous Israeli participants in Eurovision had all looked more or less “white,” or at least white-passing. Most of them were Ashkenazi – Jews whose ancestors had spent the long years of exile in Europe.
But Cohen, with his dark skin and gravity-defying cloud of curly hair, was from a Yemenite family. Most of the world had no idea that Yemenite Jews even existed, or that Israeli and Jewish culture went beyond matza balls and the Holocaust.
Partially, that ignorance was by design. We’ve talked at length in other episodes about Israel’s founding fathers’ vision for the country: secular, Westernized, European, Ashkenazi. They hadn’t bargained on the nearly one million Jews from Arab and Muslim countries who arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1980. And they certainly hadn’t expected these Mizrahi Jews to completely upend the culture of the Jewish state.
For the first few decades of the country’s existence, radio stations refused to play Mizrahi music, choosing instead to broadcast the folk, pop, and rock of mainly Ashkenazi artists.
So Cohen’s breakout was a breakthrough. As he said in an interview on the podcast Israel Story:
“We were a very small country, that wanted to show the whole world [that] beside the wars and that we are the best fighters and soldiers, we wanted to show our culture to the world. And you know, everyone knew that Israel it’s hava nagila hava, something Jewish, you know, Eastern European Jews. And I came there, and I made like a change in the way they look at us, because suddenly Israel was a-ba-ni-bi-o-bo-he-be-v, we were young, beautiful, active, bringing new things to the world, and it was like a turning point.”
That turning point went way beyond Eurovision.
A year before Cohen’s win, in 1977, Prime Minister Menachem Begin upended the Israeli political establishment, unseating the Labor party that had controlled the Knesset since the country’s inception. He owed his victory to the Mizrahi voters who turned out for him in droves, thrilled that finally, a politician seemed to actually care about their needs. And now, Israel had chosen a Yemenite Jew to be its representative on the world stage – a serious breakthrough for Mizrahi artists who were regularly shunned by the tastemakers and cultural elites.
The times, they were a-changin’. Well. Mostly.
Because even as Israel was undergoing a mini cultural revolution, many of its neighbors stubbornly continued to pretend it didn’t exist, which made its participation in Eurovision quite an inconvenience.
So when it became clear that Israel was about to win the contest, Jordan cut the live broadcast, replacing it with a still image of daffodils. (Hey, daffodils are beautiful, I get it.)
A day later, Jordanian TV aired the Belgian song, which had come in second, claiming it had won first place, and other Arab nations picked up the lie as well. I guess you could reasonably expect to get away with those kinds of shenanigans in the days before the Internet. But the Arab world’s Eurovision problem was just beginning. Because traditionally, the country that wins gets to host the next Eurovision. Which meant that Eurovision 1979 was coming to Jerusalem, baby!
It was the first time that Eurovision had been held outside of Europe, and the Arab states were not happy. Not only did they refuse to broadcast the competition, they pressured a semi-friendly country, Turkey, to pull out entirely by threatening its oil supply.
Very mature, very normal.
Yugoslavia – remember Yugoslavia?! Let’s be real, my primary association with the former country is Vlade Divac – anyway, Yugoslavia stayed out of the competition as well, refusing to broadcast a singing contest from, quote, “the occupied city of Jerusalem.” A report in Yugoslavia’s Delo newspaper noted that “As is known, our country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, nor does it cooperate with it in the cultural field.”
A better and less petty person than I am probably wouldn’t use this as an opportunity to gloat. But hey, never let it be said that I am not occasionally petty. And so I am kind of laughing at all the countries who refused to participate in or broadcast the competition in 1979, because – once again – Israel won.
Two wins in two years? Not bad, Israel, not bad.
Though the performers kinda looked like mathletes with pizzazz – we’re talking sparkly suspenders, bow ties, and a cute coordinated shuffle – the music must have resonated with the audience. The winning ballad, Hallelujah, swept the European charts. It was a #1 hit in Finland, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden and found great success (GREAT SUCCESS) in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and West Germany. The words are simple, the message hopeful, and the melody easy enough for anyone to hum along.
[insert clip]
Hallelujah to the world
Hallelujah, we’ll all sing
With one single word, the heart fills with so much gratitude
And it fits right in – what a wonderful world!
It wasn’t the flashiest performance in Eurovision history. There were no bells or whistles, no elaborate lighting changes or intricate costumes. But with its home court advantage, Israel went simple, with a four-person band named, appropriately, Milk and Honey. One woman, three men, singing their hearts out on their own home turf. In the videos from that night, it’s easy to spot Izhar Cohen, decked out in the most 70s outfit I’ve ever seen, clapping and beaming as another singer of Yemeite descent clinched Israel’s second Eurovision victory, so soon after the first.
Once again, Israel had made headlines for all the right reasons. Less than a decade after Munich and the Yom Kippur War and the Entebbe hostage rescue, the Jewish state was finally in the news for a simple reason. A boring, corny, normal reason. For two brief nights in 1978 and 1979, Israel wasn’t a symbol or a rallying cry or a miracle. It was just… another country that had recently won a singing competition.
But after the contest was over, after the glittery suspenders were hung up and the world had moved on, after the corny and beautiful message of Hallelujah had all but faded, life in Israel continued as it had before – a series of monumental, historic changes.
A peace treaty with Egypt that September.
A war with the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982.
An intifada in 1987.
An unexpected handshake on the White House Lawn in 1993.
The shocking assassination of a prime minister in 1995.
Through it all, the Jewish state continued sending musical acts to the European stage. Some were successful. Israel came in second in both 1982 and 1983, with deeply Jewish songs like “Horah” and “Hai.” Here’s Avi Toledano singing Hora in 1982, accompanied by backup dancers who were, inexplicably, not doing a hora.
insert clip
It’s a quintessentially Israeli performance: a Moroccan Jewish singer backed by an ethnically diverse dance troupe, celebrating an iconic Jewish tradition with Balkan and Eastern European roots. The lyrics are subtle, but the theme is unmistakable. This is a song about continuity and memory. About joy. About what happens when a scattered people return home.
Just listen to the lyrics
And also the hora, the one with the “Hey!”
Its voice still rises, its voice is not stilled
And this hora, the one with the “Hey!”
Its song fills my heart forever
…Within everyone’s heart, the old song and dance continue to beat
Most of the audience likely didn’t understand a word, aside from maybe hora. But they recognized joy when they saw it. More than that: they recognized specificity. No other country could have sent such a song, because no other country could have told such a story.
Prior songs had celebrated universal themes like, love, or peace, or optimism. Even 1979 winner Hallelujah was ecumenical, its themes of optimism and gratitude broadly applicable to the entire world. But Hora was Israel’s first attempt to represent the specifically Jewish character of the state. And it resonated.
So the next year, 1983, the selection committee repeated the formula with another song about Jewish continuity – a particularly fitting theme for a song competition held in Munich.
Less than forty years after the Holocaust, 11 years after the atrocity at the Munich Olympics, the iconic Israeli singer Ofra Haza took the stage and proudly declared that the nation of Israel still lived. Fittingly, the song is called Chai, or Alive, and despite its uptempo beat, the lyrics still give me chills.
[insert clip – Noam recites lyrics in English]
Alive, alive, alive – Yes, I’m still alive!
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing]
I’m still alive, alive, alive
The people of Israel live
(Nerd corner alert! We actually ended our season 2 finale with this banger, back when we used to end each episode with a Hebrew song. Should we bring that back? That was fun. Does this count as a nerd corner alert? Are we big enough to have meta nerd corner alerts about ourselves?)
Both in 1982 and 1983, Israel came in second. But it would take another 15 years – and a string of good to mediocre to truly embarrassing songs – for another Israeli to take home the proverbial gold. Nineteen years after Israel’s homecourt Eurovision win in 1979, the Jewish state again made history, sending a groundbreaking representative who would change Eurovision forever.
Her name was Dana International.
But you’ll have to wait til next week to hear the story of how she revolutionized Eurovision.