Welcome back to part 2 of 2 of our Eurovision mini-series. Last week, we talked about the origins of this delightful, demented musical extravaganza and explained why a country in ASIA participates in a competition for EUROPE. (We did not explain why Australia participates, however, because the theories are a lot more entertaining than the truth, which is that their national broadcaster is somehow affiliated with the European Broadcasting Union, despite being roughly ten million miles away. Whatever. Not the point!)
We left off last week on a cliffhanger. I promised to tell you the story of the Israeli representative who made history and revolutionized Eurovision in the process. So we’re picking up in 1998, when Dana International took home the proverbial gold.
[insert clip]
She strode onto the stage in a sparkly one-shouldered bodycon dress, beaming, extending her arms as though to hug the entire audience. Over a fast-paced techno beat, she belted out an ode to a powerful, “larger than life” woman walking in the footsteps of Cleopatra and Aphrodite, as four women in 90s-style black power suits harmonized behind her, arms linked as they stalked the stage in a strange, celebratory side-step. Honestly, they look like your mom’s non-Jewish coworkers good-naturedly trying to dance at your bar mitzvah and failing. It was adorable.
It was also profoundly controversial.
For the first 24 years of her life, Dana International had lived as a man. She had always known she was transgender, coming out to her traditional Yemenite parents at the age of 13. But it was only after her gender-reassignment surgery at 24 that she began pursuing her other dream: music.
Her first album went gold in Israel (and, nerd corner alert: was sold illegally in Jordan and Egypt). A follow-up album went platinum. She won Best Female Artist of the Year in 1994.
But she wasn’t satisfied.Not until she strode onto a Birmingham stage on May 9, 1998 and made history. Dana’s Eurovision win was huge news across the world, and her winning song, Diva, became a smash hit across Europe.
Back home in Israel, however, things were more complicated.
[insert clip – in English, Noam doesn’t have to read]
0:55 -1:40
A gala welcome home for Israel’s new number one heroine and top ratings on Israel television when Dana International won the popular Eurovision song contest. But she isn’t a hit with all Israelis. Dana is a transsexual and the Orthodox religious are aghast that she represented the state of the Jews. Homosexuality is a crime and transsexuals deviant, alleges this Rabbi. I am ashamed that Israel sent this deviant to represent Israel in the Eurovision. It didn’t it doesn’t bring to me a honor to feel that I am citizen of Israel that we won in the Eurovision.
[back to Noam]
Now, to be clear, homosexuality is absolutely not, and never has been, a crime in Israel. The CNN newscaster, and the rabbi he’s interviewing, aren’t talking about “crime” in the legal sense. Clearly, Israel’s more conservative citizens were less than pleased that their country was the first to break this particular taboo.
But Dana met their scorn and shame with pride.
[insert clip – in English, Noam doesn’t have to read]
3:23 – 4:05
I think that if you hate someone or if you dislike someone you just make you feel bad and that is ugly feeling, so I don’t like to hate people. I just love, you know, to give uh positive energies out of myself and to share my success with all the people that would like to share it with me, and you know, to be a positive thinking person, nothing more. And if a group of people has a problem with me, it’s their problem… I don’t think that my sexuality is more important than my personality, so it’s about time to wake up, people.
[back to Noam]
It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary Dana was. As the music journalist and Jewish activist Eve Barlow wrote in The Guardian in 2018, quote:
“Twenty years ago there was no Ru Paul or Trixie Mattel; the Oscar-winning Hilary Swank movie Boys Don’t Cry was a year away… Dana’s performance at Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena felt like a watershed moment, a major celebration of a trans artist on an international stage. …She… signalled the importance of the fun, free, gregarious culture of Eurovision as an annual LGBTQ-friendly celebration. Eurovision fanatic and Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills explains: ‘Eurovision is about the music, but it’s also about diversity, particularly for countries that aren’t No 1 on your list of places to go if you’re gay. Dana International massively paved the way. It was an extremely brave thing to do at the time, gave a lot of people courage and raised important issues in countries where tolerance has been low.’”
[back to Noam]
Today, Tel Aviv is internationally famous as the gay capital of the Middle East (not that there’s much competition for that role). Today, it’s estimated that a quarter of Tel Aviv’s residents identify as gay or lesbian.
But back in 1998, Dana was breaking new ground. Her Eurovision win changed how people thought about Israel. She presented a side of the country that had nothing to do with conflict, or politics, or fights over religion. A side that was youthful, exciting, progressive, permissive, sparkly. Here was a country in the Middle freaking East that could easily rival or outpace Europe for its open-mindedness.
To many Israelis – particularly LGBTQ Israelis – Dana represented possibility. If a little boy from a poor, traditional, Mizrahi family could grow up to be an internationally beloved, wildly successful, Eurovision-winning diva, then anything was possible.
Today, Eurovision is jokingly referred to as the Gay Olympics, for its celebration of all things LGBTQ. But that wasn’t always the case. True, Luxembourg had competed in 1961 with a song about forbidden love between a same-sex couple, but it wasn’t until an openly, proudly trans representative won first place that the competition began to wear its queerness openly.
As the world changed, the competition changed with it. Just two years after Dana’s groundbreaking Eurovision win, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. Other European and North American countries soon followed. The contest that was meant to bring Europe together soon began to reflect those changing attitudes. But if Europe was grappling with changing mores around sex, gender, and sexuality, Israel was still primarily focused on its biggest challenge: conflicts with the neighbors.
The 90s had been a time of hope. Of negotiations and peace deals, of offers and Accords. Oslo in 93 and 95. Peace with Jordan in 94. The Camp David Summit in 2000. And in the last months before the start of the Second Intifada in September of 2000, Israel’s Eurovision entry reflected the country’s hope for peace… in the most bizarre and embarrassing way possible.
Most Israelis have memory-holed their country’s 2000 Eurovision entry, a bizarre pop anthem by the band Ping Pong, who brought a little bit of everything to the Stockholm stage.
We’ll start with the extremely 90s fashion choices, from the micro-miniskirts and knee high boots to the guy whose fully unbuttoned shirt flapped open to reveal the Chinese characters for PING PONG inked on his stomach. There was the split-second kiss between Mr. Ping Pong and the other male singer, who was wearing sunglasses and a lime-green suit jacket. There was the inexplicable lyric I want, I want a cucumber. There was the, well, I hesitate to call it dancing, because it mostly looked like chaos. And there was the all-time classy, classic lyric, which I’m truly blushing too hard to actually repeat, but let’s just say that the singer was really into her new boyfriend in Damascus.
Yup, Damascus, as in the capital of Syria – a country that does not participate in Eurovision or recognize the State of Israel. It is literally illegal for Syrians to have any kind of contact with Israelis, so I’m going to guess that the boyfriend from the song was imaginary. A symbol of what could be, if the adults in the room just got their act together and made peace. Because PingPong was very much a youthful act, the kind of innocent chaos that only the young and hopeful can pull off. The entire mess was punctuated by the band’s repeated, peppy injunctions to BE HAPPY.
And though the Israeli Broadcasting Authority had warned the band that they were not, by any means, allowed to fly the flag of an enemy country on live TV, PingPong happily ignored that message, as well as the broadcasting authority’s official dis-endorsement. (Yep, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority was so disgusted by the entry that they officially washed their hands of the band, forcing them to pay their own way to Stockholm.)
To hammer home the general theme of peace and forbidden cross-border lust, PingPong ended their performance waving mini Syrian and Israeli flags and shouting PEACE! into their microphones.
The audience may have appreciated the unlikely message, but they did not like the performance, which came in 22nd out of 24th. (To be fair, the band had entered as a joke, and were very surprised to find that they had beat out 83 other musical acts to be Israel’s representatives.) Still, joke or not, PingPong reflected their country’s youthful, hopeful left wing. They were liberal, secular, gay-friendly, and ready for peace and love.
Not for long.
The Second Intifada erupted just a few months after PingPong arrived in Stockholm with their peppy peace anthem. So Israel’s 2000 Eurovision entry is a bittersweet time capsule of sorts, showcasing the last moments of levity and hope before the country went up in flames.
Yet even at the height of the Second Intifada, no Israeli artist wanted to directly address the country’s woes at Eurovision, preferring instead to sing generically optimistic songs about love and hope, in a mixture of Hebrew and English.
At least, until the iconic Israeli band Teapacks (TEE-pecs) entered the contest in 2007, with what is – in my opinion – a brilliant and pointed piece of cultural and political criticism, presented on the surface as a joke.
But Teapacks – which, fun fact, is the Hebrew word for White-Out – were dead serious about their subject: nuclear annihilation.
[insert clip – in English, Noam doesn’t have to read]
The world is full of terror
If someone makes an error
He’s gonna blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come
There are some crazy rulers
They hide and try to fool us
With demonic, technologic willingness to harm
They’re gonna push the button, push the button
Push the bu… push the bu… push the button
Push the button, push the button
Push the bu… push the bu… push the button
[back to Noam]
It was an earworm, presented in three languages and multiple genres by a band that one YouTube commenter describes as looking like “a criminal gang from an Adam Sandler movie.” (When the guy in the lab coat with the accordion is the most normal looking of the bunch, you’ve got a serious fashion problem on your hands. The video is in the show notes – it has to be seen to be believed.)
It was demented, energetic, and surprisingly clever, full of self-referential in-jokes that only an Israeli audience would understand. Also, the Hebrew rap was epic.
But despite its satirical trimmings, the song was an extremely serious meditation on the country’s eternal tightrope walk between celebrating life and falling into existential despair.
The Second Intifada had ended two years earlier – just in time for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make headlines at the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran, in which he stated that Israel should be wiped off the map. Though buses had largely stopped exploding in Israeli cities, the so-called Gaza Envelope – where Teapacks’ lead singer is from – was being hammered by Hamas rockets on the regular.
Things were tough in Israel. But the lyrics reflected the still-undimmed hope for a normal life, battling with the cynicism of living in a tinderbox.
[insert clip – Noam has to read this part, it’s translated from Hebrew]
2:18 – 2:40
Maybe this is too sharp
We should sing songs of palm trees,
Songs of the desert, without flags
I am still alive, alive, alive
And if it continues to be scary, only then will I say…
I’m gonna push the button
[back to Noam]
Did you catch the reference to Ofra Haza’s 1983 song “Chai,” alive? I told you this work of under-appreciated genius is deeply self-referential!
And yes, there is a throughline in Israel and for Jewish people around the world that we love singing about the fact we are still here!
It’s a testament to the razor-sharp lyrics – or maybe to the unchanging nature of the Israeli political landscape – that Push the Button remains as topical as ever. Technically, Eurovision songs are not supposed to be political, and I’m not sure how this one sneaked past whoever decides what “political” even means. To be honest, I don’t think they enforce it very strictly, considering that Israel’s 2009 Eurovision entry was a duet by an Israeli Arab and an Israeli Jew, lamenting in Hebrew, Arabic, and English There must be another way – an obvious reference to the conflict.
But it doesn’t matter how peaceful the message might be. To some, Israel’s mere presence in the competition – like Israel’s mere existence – is inherently a political statement. So by the time the country clinched its fourth Eurovision win in 2018, the anti-Israel activists were ready.
Or as ready as one can be for a song whose primary hook is… chicken noises.
Netta Barzilai was an unlikely ambassador for the Jewish state. Her song was almost entirely in English (and Chicken), and her aesthetic borrowed heavily from Japanese culture. She performed in a kimono with sweeping bell sleeves, endless rows of golden Japanese “lucky cat” statuettes waving behind her.
But the song’s content reflected the politics of the moment. Toy is a punchy feminist anthem delivered at the height of #MeToo by a female pop star who bucked traditional beauty standards, which is a sanitized way of saying that Netta is a woman of size.
But despite the universality of the message, her send-off was pure Israel. In case you can’t hear that over the roar of the audience, she’s shouting Thank you, Europe. Kapara Aleichem – an untranslatable and uniquely Israeli phrase popular with Mizrahi grandmas that roughly means “I love you” and literally means “an atonement over you.” (I told you it was untranslatable.)
But Netta’s surprising 2018 win wasn’t met with universal celebration. In Israel, gloomy headlines announced “Netta’s Eurovision Win Is Also a Challenge,” reflecting that, quote:
“Barzilai, who spoke of her win as one for acceptance of those who are different, still represents a country that does not excel in accepting the other. During the time Barzilai was taking part in Eurovision, Israel continued in its occupation of millions of rights-deprived Palestinians, killing protesters in Gaza and making plans to violate the rights of asylum seekers living in Israel.”
They’re so cheery over at Ha’aretz, aren’t they? The article continues, quote:
“Barzilai herself told Kan broadcasting that her win would be something positive for Israeli hasbara. In a congratulatory phone call, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even called her Israel’s best ambassador. The Israeli government coopting Barzilai’s win – coopting the public relations with which she by her own admission might take part in – could serve as gender-washing. Israel is now seen to be sending a feminist message, and as a state that expresses democratic values.”
The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) activists of the world agreed. When Israel, as the winning country, hosted Eurovision the next year, the bands were warned: no political signage. No reference to the conflict. No storming the stage in protest with angry signs. Seriously, just be chill.
Most bands complied.
Not Iceland’s.
The country’s broadcaster had resisted the calls to boycott the competition, but the Icelandic band – Hatari – found a way to communicate their anger anyway. As the camera zoomed in on the band, they unfurled a massive Palestinian flag – a silent protest that was met with resounding boos in the Tel Aviv arena.
The EBU fined Iceland’s participating broadcaster, which was not particularly happy about paying the five-thousand-Euro fine. They couldn’t control the band’s behavior. They’d warned them to play nice. It wasn’t their fault the band refused to listen.
But Hatari’s protest was nothing compared to what was to come.
It’s strange, now, to remember that for most of 2023, things were normal, or as normal as things ever are in Israel. The country’s Eurovision entry that year was pure pop fun – a feminist anthem called Unicorn, paired with the kind of elaborate choreographed dance that makes me feel tired just watching. It was gaudy and electric and silly and fun.
It was Israel’s last year of relative normalcy.
October 7th changed that, maybe for good.
Because even as Israel grappled with the shock and trauma of the attack and the subsequent seven-front war, even as antisemitism exploded around the world and ordinary Jews found themselves in the uncomfortable position of ambassadors for the Jewish state, whoever makes these decisions decided that the show would go on, because it HAD to.
Because Israel would not shy away from Europe’s stages, no matter how angry that made a vocal minority of people.
Because Israel deserved a moment of lightness, of healing, of mourning through song.
Because Israel was not going to be elbowed out of public life. If other countries had a problem, they could leave. Israel refused.
But the country was under no illusions. The competition was yet another battlefield in the war of public opinion. Which meant the performer had to be strong enough to handle the unrelenting torrent of hatred, anger, criticism, and negativity sure to come his or her way – all while carrying an entire nation’s grief.
But the Israeli songwriters had not bargained on the EBU’s scrutiny. The first version of Israel’s 2024 Eurovision entry, October Rain, was scrapped for being “too political” – a charge that enraged many Israelis. One journalist wrote, scathingly, “If folding were a sport, [the Israeli broadcaster] would get a perfect score.”
But fold they did. And so instead of sending Eden Golan to Malmo to sing “October Rain,” Israel sent her to sing the far less specific version, “Hurricane,” whose words were generic enough to apply to basically any crisis. (In fact, one of the songwriters claimed the song was inspired in part by her divorce.)
Not that it mattered.
Everyone knew what the song was about.
Everyone understood that the video, the dancing, even Golan’s outfit, a gauzy, tattered white dress, were explicit references to the 344 civilians and 34 security personnel murdered at the Nova music festival that October. The original version of the song contained a single explicit reference to the partygoers mowed down pitilessly on the festival grounds: “They were all good kids, every one of them.”
I’ll be honest. It’s extremely hard for me to listen to either version of this song without tearing up – particularly the acoustic version Golan performed at a hostage rally in Tel Aviv in May of 2024.
But grief wasn’t the only emotion that the song conjured. Because Israel’s participation in the contest that year made a number of people very, very angry.
When Golan arrived in Malmo, thousands of people crowded the streets in protest. The tenor of these protests was so angry, so frightening, that the head of the Shin Bet – Israel’s version of the FBI – personally oversaw Golan’s security detail, which included multiple body guards, an armed convoy, and a mandatory disguise every time she left her hotel room. Not that she was allowed to do much of that. With the exception of rehearsals and performances, she was completely locked down.
The isolation was total, because most of the other contestants snubbed her. Golan later told the Jerusalem Post that of the 36 other contestants, only four were nice to her. One of those four – the representative from Luxembourg – is Israeli, so maybe make that three. In fact, many of the performers went out of their way to criticize and censure Golan for having the audacity to show up at their contest, and one even claimed that she cried when she heard that Israel would be performing.
But despite the protests and the nastiness, despite the constant booing from the audience, despite Golan’s fear that she would be shot on stage, the performance went off without a hitch, and Israel came in fifth.
It was a moment of catharsis for the entire Jewish world.
At the time of Golan’s performance in May of 2024, over 100 Israeli hostages remained in Gaza. Some were confirmed living, like Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents had received their first sign of life a month earlier. Others were confirmed dead, like 84-year-old Amiram Cooper, who had been murdered in captivity. Most were question marks. No one knew if they were living or dead. No one knew what they were suffering. The uncertainty was agony, and the agony was total.
Eden gave voice to that agony.
And mixed in with that pain was hope. Because despite everything, here was Israel, represented by a tiny 20-year-old woman with a spine of steel. Eden gave no indication that she even heard the boos or the bullying or the cries for boycott. She sang her heart out, delivering a powerful and emotional performance that came in fifth.
And that mattered to Israelis. Because while the jury scored her very, very low, she got the second-highest number of public votes, proving that despite the boycotts, despite the vitriol, ordinary people around the world were on her side.
On Israel’s side.
People around the world were listening to Israel’s story.
They weren’t getting sucked in by the propaganda, by the anger. The other artists hadn’t shown Eden a shred of sensitivity or kindness. But ordinary folks watching at home loved her. For a traumatized nation at war, that mattered. For Diaspora Jews, that mattered.
The worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust had been met not with sympathy, but with an outpouring of hatred and denials and protests.
It was a shocking wake-up call. But for this one night in May of 2024, Israelis and Jews around the world were reminded that not everyone hated them. Not everyone denied or mocked their pain.
When the time came to pick a contestant for 2025, Israel chose a 24-year-old survivor of the Nova festival massacre. The day of the massacre, 50 young people fled to a roadside shelter.
Only 11 made it out.
Yuval Raphael was one of them. She survived rockets, grenades, and machine gun fire by hiding underneath dead bodies for eight hours. Less than two years later, she was on stage in Basel, Switzerland, singing about the mingled hope and pain that all Israelis have carried since October 7th.
128 years after Theodor Herzl “built a Jewish state in Basel” at the first Zionist Congress, 24-year-old Yuval was singing about overcoming that state’s worst moment, looking forward to the “new day” rising over the horizon.
And when the song ended, Yuval looked at the audience through a teary smile and shouted THANK YOU EUROPE! AM YISRAEL CHAI!
She came in second. Just as before, the jury scored her incredibly low. But she had the highest public scores by a mile. Once again, Israelis remembered: not everyone hates you. People around the world were profoundly moved by Yuval’s talent and strength. Look at the comments underneath the video of her final performance. They are universally adoring. And I won’t lie. Looking at them gives me a little glimmer of hope, too.
Yuval co-wrote the song we played at the top: Israel’s 2026 entry, Michelle, performed by 28-year-old singer Noam Bettan, who came to Austria fully prepared for the booing and the snubbing and the boycotts.
After two years of deliberating, five countries boycotted the contest over Israel’s participation. Some, like Spain and Ireland, were not particularly surprising. The leadership of both countries has been very vocal about their feelings towards Israel.
But I didn’t expect the Netherlands, Iceland, and Slovenia to join them.
Not until I thought about it.
Not until I remembered the near-daily slew of social media clips from around the world that show Jews and Israelis being harassed, beaten up, and excluded from public spaces, our synagogues firebombed, our institutions vandalized. Among those clips was the chilling footage of the Amsterdam pogrom of 2024, during which Israeli soccer fans were hunted and beaten in the streets after a soccer match. Later press coverage blamed the violence on the Israelis’ behavior.
Yeah, when I remembered the surge of antisemitism that began on October 8th and seems to grow stronger by the day, I realized I wasn’t actually surprised at this boycott at all.
And neither were the four writers and composers who worked on Noam’s song. Because on the surface, their song, Michelle, is about a toxic relationship with a woman. It’s got all the hallmarks of a breakup song: reflections on how beautiful this woman is, how much the guy loves her, how hard it is to let her go.
But the song also works on a much deeper level. Because many have speculated that it’s not about a woman at all, but an entire continent. That Noam Bettan was declaring – in three languages! – that Israel was breaking up with Europe, no longer interested in a toxic love affair with a continent that repeatedly demonstrated that Jews were not welcome.
[insert clip at 2:30 – Noam has to read translation bc it’s in Hebrew and French]
And maybe in the end, things will turn out well for us
Praying for you that you’ll get to love
In between tears, there is someone who will hear
There is someone who will hear
I’m letting you go, goodbye my beautiful Michelle
I’m letting you go, but I love you
The queen of problems
But if Israel is breaking up with Europe, Europe didn’t seem to realize. For the second year in a row, the Jewish state came in second, buoyed by the public votes. As with Yuval Raphael, the YouTube comments on Bettan’s performance are almost universally adoring. If nothing else, the audience seemed to agree that he put on a hell of a performance.
And that is why Israel continues to appear at Eurovision, despite the boycotts and boos and snide articles in the New York Times insinuating that the country’s success in the competition is due to some kind of Jewish trickery.
Because at Eurovision, Israel gets to tell its own story.
It gets to decide who represents the Jewish state.
It gets to decide what they say and how they say it.
And it doesn’t matter if the audience loves it or hates it, if they boycott, if they boo.
Sure, the cheers are nice.
So is placing second.
But I’m prepared to bet that the Jewish state would continue to send a representative to Eurovision even if they came in dead last each year.
Because it’s not about how other countries react. It’s about the power to tell our story, on our terms, with all its heartbreak and hope and inexplicable chicken noises. It’s about the ability to smile at an audience of thousands – some booing, some cheering, all certainly very drunk – and shout Am Yisrael Chai into the microphone for the world to hear.
So that’s the story of Eurovision and here are your five fast facts.
- Eurovision is an international song competition sponsored by the European Broadcasting Union, which includes broadcasters that are not actually in Europe.
- Israel became a member of the EBU in 1957, but didn’t have the money to send a representative to Eurovision until 1973.
- Since then, Israel has won the competition four times – 78, 79, 98, 2018.
- The 1998 win was particularly groundbreaking, because Israel’s representative that year was a transwoman who paved the way for other queer musicians to shine at the contest.
- Since October 7, the Israeli entries have taken on a much more resonant, emotional tone, and despite criticism, protests, and boycotts, have received surprisingly high scores.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian Eliezer Berkovitz once commented on a disturbing Haaretz article from 1978, in which the journalist wrote, quote:
“We were not Jews, but Israelis. The word “Jew” was hardly ever heard. We were courageous, sabras, different. When one of us traveled in a foreign country, he would come back and say proudly: They didn’t notice at all that I was a Jew.” End quote.
Maybe this sentiment sounds familiar to you from previous episodes. We’ve talked before about the motivations of early Zionist thinkers, including Herzl, who believed that a sovereign Jewish state was the key to being just like everyone else. And once the Jews were normal, like everyone else, antisemitism would evaporate. Other Zionist thinkers went even further, proposing that they were not Jews at all, but Hebrews. Jews were a people of the past, of the Diaspora. Hebrews were a new generation that would grow up without fear.
But those early Zionists were wrong. And the Haaretz writer who wrote about how exhilarating it was to be seen as an Israeli rather than a Jew was wrong, too. Maybe, in 1978, it was possible to just be an Israeli – a normal person from a normal country. I doubt it, but maybe. In 2026, however, it is impossible for Israelis to go anywhere in the world without feeling their Jewishness settle on their shoulders like a shawl they can’t – and don’t want to – take off.
And there’s the paradox of Jewish identity in 2026. Israel was established so Jews could finally be normal, safe, protected. Within Israel, plenty of Israelis give absolutely no thought to their Judaism. It’s ambient, just another part of Israeli culture. Out in the world, however, it’s a different story. Even utterly secular Israelis realize that when they are abroad, they are Jews first.
So Eurovision presents an interesting bind for Israelis.
On the one hand, Israel participates in the competition just like everyone else (except for Spain, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, that is.) Israeli performers nail their choreography and hit all the right notes and sometimes even bring home trophies. But the whole time, as they’re performing in an international competition, they are acutely aware: they are not like everyone else. They are Jews first.
Israel’s participation in Eurovision isn’t just about music. It’s a meditation on one of Zionism’s deepest questions. Can Jews ever be a normal people?
And the answer is complicated.
Because on the one hand, of course Jews are like everyone else. We participate, don’t we? We show up. We cheer for colorful pop stars. We argue about costumes and voting blocs and bad performances just like everyone else.
But only Jews are confined to their hotel rooms because of security threats. Only Jews have to wear a disguise just to leave the hotel. Only Jews are told repeatedly they aren’t welcome.
And despite all that, only Jews can stride onto that stage, perform despite the boos and protests, and then shout Am Yisrael Chai. Only Jews can infuse the songs they sing with thousands of years of history and memory and trauma and hope. Only Jews could come up with Hora, or Hai, or Hurricane. And maybe that’s the enduring lesson as I see it.
Many early Zionists didn’t see much in Jewish history that was worth saving. Israelis at Eurovision have proven them wrong. Because they’ve made it clear: The Zionist dream isn’t let’s be like everyone else. Turns out that was never an option.
Instead, the Zionist dreams looks a lot more like: let’s create the conditions we need to contribute something unique to the world.
Let’s mingle with the other countries in the family of nations – without forgetting we are a tribe.
And let’s join the world choir to sing the songs that only we can sing.