There was something almost unbearably poignant about this year\u2019s Israeli Eurovision entry.\n<\/p>\n
On the surface, Michelle appeared to comply perfectly with Eurovision\u2019s insistence on political neutrality: a multilingual love song, wistful, romantic, and melancholy, about a toxic relationship and lingering heartbreak.\n<\/p>\n
Yet many listeners immediately sensed that the song was reaching toward something larger. As several commentators have observed, Michelle lends itself naturally to broader interpretation.\n<\/p>\n
Hebrew blended into French and English as the singer pleaded with a lost love who had once been \u201cmy light,\u201d but who had now left him in darkness. And as the performance unfolded, it became increasingly difficult to experience it as merely a song about romance. Amid boos from sections of the crowd, yet buoyed by ecstatic Israeli supporters in the arena and overwhelming public support across Europe, Michelle seemed to transform into something far larger. It became, somehow, a lament for Europe itself.\n<\/p>\n
Michelle. The name matters. It is not Yael or Tamar or Maya. It is unmistakably French, unmistakably European. Elegant. Cultured. Romantic. The Europe of caf\u00e9s, literature, philosophy, symphonies, enlightenment, and humanism. The Europe that Jews loved so deeply for so long, even while history repeatedly warned them that the relationship was never entirely safe. Perhaps that is why the song struck such a nerve for some of us.\n<\/p>\n
Because viewed through a different lens, Michelle no longer sounds like a song about a failed romance. It sounds like Israel, perhaps even the Jewish people themselves, singing not to a lost lover, but to Europe.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were my light.\u201d In this larger context, it\u2019s a devastating line. For centuries, Europe truly was the light for many Jews. Jewish civilization flourished in Prague, Vilna, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Paris. Jews contributed disproportionately to European science, medicine, philosophy, music, economics, and law. They rolled up their sleeves and helped build the societies around them. They did not arrive as conquerors. They arrived as guests, often poor and vulnerable ones, determined to contribute, adapt, and belong, while still preserving enough of their Jewish culture and religious practice to sustain the unbroken chain of Judaism stretching back more than three thousand years.\n<\/p>\n
Europe helped shape the modern Jewish mind, just as the Jews helped shape that of Europe. Even Zionism itself was, in many ways, a European intellectual project born from Europe\u2019s failure to rise above its own antisemitism.\n<\/p>\n
And then Europe became the graveyard of Jewish civilization. Through action and inaction, collaboration and indifference, Europe became the continent on which six million Jews were murdered when one of the most sophisticated civilizations in human history collapsed into barbarism.\n<\/p>\n
For my generation, the grandchildren of survivors and refugees, those memories were not just abstract history; they were our family histories. My maternal grandparents escaped Poland before the war. Then, shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland, my grandmother managed to help two of her nine siblings escape, saving their lives. Six other siblings, together with her parents and grandfather, were murdered in the camps. A brother was press-ganged into the Red Army and disappeared without a trace. The complete and stunningly beautiful family smiles at me each day from my wall, frozen forever in a priceless black-and-white image, taken just before hatred, indifference, and barbarism swept them away.\n<\/p>\n
Like many second-generation families, we grew up hearing the same warning: It can happen again. But we did not believe it. We assumed those fears belonged to another age, born of the understandable trauma carried by people who had witnessed civilization collapse around them. Meanwhile, postwar Europe seemed transformed. Liberal, democratic, enlightened, morally introspective. Antisemitism had become socially radioactive. The lessons of history, we believed, had finally been learned. Michelle had changed.\n<\/p>\n
But it turned out we were fooling ourselves. The Holocaust did not erase antisemitism in Europe. It merely drove it underground. For decades, shame and social stigma kept it away from polite conversation. Yet beneath the surface, many Jews still encountered familiar reflexes: Assumptions about money, tribal loyalty, influence, or dual allegiance. Not usually violent hatred; something quieter. Cultural sediment accumulated over centuries that never entirely disappeared.\n<\/p>\n
When we did see or feel it, many of us ignored it, minimized it, explained it away as something manageable. And yet what emerged across much of Europe after October 7, 2023, felt deeply unsettling to many Jews precisely because it did not feel entirely new. It felt frighteningly familiar.\n<\/p>\n
One does not need to believe Europe is on the verge of fascism to recognize troubling signs: The intimidation of Jewish students, the rationalization of what are in fact genocidal slogans, the selective policing of speech, the inability of sections of the political and cultural elite to distinguish between a democratic society defending itself and totalitarian movements glorifying death. And perhaps most dangerous of all, the relentless moral conditioning of the public by much of the legacy media.\n<\/p>\n
For decades, much of Europe\u2019s media establishment has portrayed Israel not as a flawed democracy fighting brutal enemies, but as a uniquely malignant force in the world. Context disappears, as cause and effect are reversed. Israeli self-defense is increasingly recast as aggression, while Hamas terrorism is reframed as resistance, grievance, or the inevitable response of the oppressed. Jewish fear is minimized while hatred directed at Jews is endlessly rationalized as understandable anger.\n<\/p>\n
No democracy can become inured to this kind of one-sided moral framing indefinitely without consequences. As Jews once again become socially acceptable targets in Europe, others will surely follow. History repeatedly teaches that societies which normalize hatred against Jews are never merely experiencing a \u201cJewish problem.\u201d The corrosion never remains confined. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews.\n<\/p>\n
And yet the point of saying all this is not to plead for Europe\u2019s affection. That, perhaps, is where the metaphor of Michelle has become most misunderstood.\n<\/p>\n
For the Jewish people are no longer helpless, stateless, dependent upon the goodwill of others for survival. Israel is no hopeless suitor singing at Europe\u2019s window, begging to be taken back.\n<\/p>\n
The song is more complicated than that. It captures the voice of someone who still cares deeply for a former love, who still sees her beauty and remembers what she once represented. The voice of someone sad and a little bit afraid; but more than anything, the voice of someone who cannot bear to see his former love destroying herself. That is why so many Jews watch Europe today not merely with fear and anger, but with pain and grief.\n<\/p>\n
Michelle was co-written and performed by Noam Bettan, a vocalist of exceptional technical and emotional range. Voices of that caliber are rare anywhere in the world. That such artistry emerged from a tiny country that must forever fight for its survival only deepened the emotional force of the performance.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened to you, Michelle?\u201d Bettan asks.\n<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s postwar moral achievement was extraordinary. Determined never again to descend into chauvinism and racial hatred, much of Europe embraced tolerance as a civilizational creed. But unlimited tolerance eventually ceases to defend even the civilization from which it comes. A society that cannot distinguish between pluralism and abandoning all moral distinctions is doomed.\n<\/p>\n
Europe has benefited enormously from immigrants who understood themselves to be joining a civilization rather than replacing one. Successful multiethnic societies require a shared civic culture: newcomers learning the national language, respecting local traditions, embracing democratic norms, and teaching their children loyalty to the country that welcomed them. When integration is abandoned in favor of relativistic multiculturalism, parallel societies and imported sectarianism, social cohesion begins to erode.\n<\/p>\n
I am talking, of course, about Europe\u2019s struggle with Islamism and failed integration. But this is not an argument against Muslims as people. Millions of Muslims simply seek peaceful and productive lives. Indeed, Europe\u2019s moderate Muslims and Jews often share a common interest in preserving religious freedom, in family cohesion, and in protection from ideological extremism. They seek a confident Europe, capable of integrating religious minorities without surrendering its civilization. They seek, that is, a Europe that will not surrender in the face of Islamism, the ideology rather than the religion; \u00a0just as the Jews do.\n<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s Eurovision contest was not encouraging in this regard, from an institutional perspective. And yet, despite the boos, despite campaigns to exclude Israel entirely, and despite boycotts from Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain directed at a contest featuring the world\u2019s only Jewish state, the European public itself delivered a message different, clearer, and more positive than the Eurovision country juries \u2013 and Europe\u2019s cultural institutions generally \u2013 were willing to acknowledge.\n<\/p>\n
There was a time when Jewish participation in European culture symbolized hope, proof that Europe had transcended its past. Today, the mere presence of Israel in a song contest increasingly provokes outrage among those who claim to champion inclusion and diversity.\n<\/p>\n
Even so, Michelle sounded more wounded than angry.\n<\/p>\n
The tragedy is not that Jews expected perfection from Europe. The tragedy is that, for perhaps the first time in two thousand years, many truly believed Michelle loved them back, at least enough for them to live there safely as equal citizens.\n<\/p>\n
I still hope Europe can recover its moral compass. I still hope it can rediscover the confidence to defend its own values without shame or hesitation. I still hope it can remember that defending liberal civilization is not oppression, and resisting barbarism is not extremism.\n<\/p>\n
When a civilization loses the ability to recognize evil clearly, when it excuses hatred in the name of compassion, and when it becomes frightened of defending its own values, the danger doesn\u2019t stop with its Jewish minority. The warning embedded in Jewish history has never been solely about Jews.\n<\/p>\n
This is the ultimate message of Michelle: not the Jews begging Europe not to destroy them, but Israel crying out for Europe not to destroy itself.\n<\/p>\n
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