How the Eurovision Censors Helped Make Eden Golan a Star

Banish the rain and you’ll get the hurricane: such is the moral of the 2024 Eurovision song competition whose Grand Final was held in the Swedish city of Malmö last Saturday night. The winning entry was Switzerland’s. Upstaging it, however, was an Israeli song called “Hurricane,” which stole the show. Although many thought it deserved to finish first, its fifth-place showing among 37 competitors was itself no small achievement given the months in which it was threatened with being banned, and the days of massive protest demonstrations, crowd abuse, and anti-Israel prejudice that led up to its final performance.

The Eurovision competition, sponsored by the European Broadcasting Union and held annually to much fanfare since 1956, is not well-known to Americans—deservedly so, one might say, since its musical level is not high. With rare exceptions, the songs performed in it, each by a group representing a different country, are imitative, kitschy, and designed to please rather than express genuine feeling. Elaborately costumed and choreographed, they are generally sung to English lyrics in an international pop style that can leave one guessing whether the performers are Norwegian or Romanian. Winners are chosen by a complicated system combining a panel of judges from the participating countries with a vote of television viewers who phone or text in their preferences, and Israel has won four times since its first appearance in 1973—in 1978, 1979, 1998, and 2018.