This week, a 28-year-old from Ra’anana named Noam Bettan walks onto a stage in Vienna to sing a three-minute French-language pop ballad about a breakup. The international cultural establishment has organized — at scale, with footnotes — to make sure the world hears him booed.

This piece is about why.

I did not watch a single minute of the Eurovision Song Contest before October 7, 2023.

I am American. Eurovision is something my country has, for reasons I have come to find very personal, opted out of. Before the fall of 2023, this was what I knew about it:

ABBA won it with “Waterloo” in 1974.

Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams made a Netflix movie about it in 2020 — the one with “Ja Ja Ding Dong.”

I assumed everything I would ever need to know about the contest was contained inside that Netflix movie.

Then October 7 happened. And like a lot of formerly comfortable American Jews, I discovered I had a great many gaps in my education I would now be filling in real time, at full speed. One of them, improbably, was Eurovision. Because seven months after the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a 20-year-old Israeli singer named Eden Golan walked into the Malmö Arena to sing a song called “Hurricane” — a song the EBU had ordered her to rename because its original title, “October Rain,” was too obviously about, well, October — and the venue she sang in turned into a kind of high-definition test case for what I had been trying to find words for since the previous fall.

The crowd booed her so loudly during rehearsals she could not hear herself sing. The broadcaster muted the audio. She finished fifth overall, second in the public televote, and first among viewers in every country in the world that was not voting for its own contestant.[1]

Then the European cultural class lost its entire mind.

I watched the whole thing live from my couch in Florida. I am not sure who I had been rooting for the year before. I cared about Eden Golan like she was my cousin. That, it turns out, is what happens to American Jews after October 7. Our cousins multiply. Our attention spans expand. Our priors collapse. And we start watching Eurovision.

What I have watched, since I started watching, is the world’s longest-running televised song contest reveal itself in real time as the cleanest contemporary case study I have seen for the conspiracy-theory framework of antisemitism I have been writing about for the better part of a year. The architecture. The operating system. The same accusations Western civilization has been workshopping in fresh vocabulary every few generations for two thousand years, this time set to synth and accent lighting.

What follows is the demonstration. I’ll explain Eurovision first, in case (like me, until recently) you have managed not to encounter it.

Quick orientation, for the Americans I have just dragged into this with me.

Eurovision is, at its core, American Idol meets the Olympics. It predates the European Union. It pulls a global audience north of 160 million viewers — roughly twice the Super Bowl. Forty-odd countries compete every May. Each sends one act with one song under three minutes. Juries vote. The audience votes. Twelve points go from each country to the winner. Douze points is, by now, a meme in seven languages.

For reasons that nobody can explain in under twenty minutes, the competing countries include Israel and Australia.

The fashion is Coachella by way of Eurotrash. The choreography is Cirque du Soleil by way of TikTok. The lyrics are, frequently, vibes. To me, as an American, watching the whole thing is best described as a cross between a fever dream and an acid trip.

The official slogan, as of 2023, is “United By Music.” We will come back to that.

I love it. I love it now. I love it with the late-in-life convert’s whole heart, the way some people find Jesus at forty. And I am about to explain exactly why the European institution most invested in the proposition that camp transcends politics has, three years running, found it psychologically necessary to lose its absolute mind over the participation of one specific country.

The interference theory.

Here is the thing about Eurovision that is making the institutional class very, very unhappy.

The Europeans keep voting for Israel.

Eden Golan, 2024: muted boos, an arena full of “Free Palestine” chants, second in the public televote, and first among non-participating viewers everywhere in the world.

Yuval Raphael, 2025: a Nova music festival survivor who lived through October 7 by hiding for hours in a concrete bunker beneath a pile of bodies, coached before her performance on how to handle the boos coming for her, tied for fourteenth in the jury vote, first in the televote with 297 points, finished second overall behind only Austria’s JJ — who has since announced he would have preferred Israel not compete in this year’s contest, which Austria is now hosting.[2]

Two consecutive years of organized BDS pressure. Open letters from cultural giants. Broadcaster demands to the EBU for Israel’s removal. Arena crowds chanting genocide accusations through the singer’s three minutes on stage. And every May the international viewing public has aimed its remote control at Israel and pressed the button.

This is, in cultural-boycott terms, a public-relations catastrophe. Cultural boycotts work by making the cost of supporting the target unbearable. The Eurovision audience appears not to have read the press release.

The institutional response has not been to ask why.

The institutional response has been to change the rules.

The EBU has, for 2026, dropped the maximum televote per fan from twenty to ten. It has rolled out new “anti-coordinated voting” measures to detect “fraudulent or coordinated voting activity.” Eight member countries formally asked it to put Israel’s participation to a member vote; the presidency declined.[3] Five countries — Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Iceland, Slovenia — have boycotted the entire contest. More than 1,100 musicians have signed an open letter: Brian Eno,........

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