In March, Rivka Halperin was watching KAN, a satellite Israeli TV station, from her home in New York when she excitedly heard about Israel’s song choice for the 69th annual Eurovision Song Contest, set to take place in Basel, Switzerland, this week. The Israeli artist, Yuval Raphael, was soulful; the song, “New Day Will Rise,” was pulsating and resonant. But there was one problem with the song that was meant to represent Israel at this year’s Eurovision that jolted Halperin.
“I’m sitting at home, anxious, curious, and listening to the song, and all of the sudden, I say to myself, ‘I can’t believe it. Of all the smart people in Israel, how could someone have made such a mistake’?”
As a former professor of Hebrew language and Israeli culture, whether at Princeton, New York University (where she obtained her doctorate), Columbia University or the Jewish Theological Seminary, Halperin immediately heard the mistake: The song, which is mostly sung in English, briefly quoted King Solomon’s Song of Songs. Raphael sang in Hebrew, “Many waters cannot quench the love, nor can rivers flood it; should a man give all the property of his house for love, they would despise him.” But due to the differences between biblical and modern Hebrew, Raphael mistakenly sang the word, “V’neharot” (rivers) instead of the correct version, “U’neharot.”
“I thought my ears were burning, literally,” recalled Halperin. “They used a few Hebrew words in the whole song. How was it possible that one of them was a mistake?”
Halperin admits that most Hebrew-language listeners, especially Israelis themselves, may not have cared much about the mistaken word. “But,” she added, “You have to hear it from my point of view as a professor of Hebrew. In the Bible, there are even vowels underneath the words. It was avoidable.”
Perhaps if Halperin had hailed from France, Spain or other larger countries that compete each year at Eurovision, which enjoys an extraordinary following worldwide (except in America), the mistake would have gone unchecked. But Halperin is from Israel, a tiny state where seemingly everyone is linked by one or two degrees of separation. The retired academic and grandmother simply took to her laptop to find an email address for someone at the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC/KAN), the participating broadcaster in the Eurovision contest that is also responsible for selecting and producing Israel’s annual song entry.
Halperin praised the song as hopeful and “very, very appropriate” for such a difficult time, and shared kind words about the well-known Israeli songwriter Keren Peles. But in an email to the broadcaster, she also pointed out the mistake. To her delight, KAN wrote back immediately. “They acknowledged it and apologized, and promised they would change it,” she said. Later that evening, Halperin was waiting for her usual Israeli TV news program to begin, and there it was: An announcement that the 24-year-old singer, Raphael, was going to rerecord the whole song because someone had found a mistake in it.
Only in Israel. And only with Israelis.
For her part, Raphael is an inspiring young woman with a heartbreaking story: she survived Hamas’ horrific massacre at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, by hiding under dead bodies for hours inside a bomb shelter. In various interviews with Israeli media, Raphael has said that she expects jeers, protests and many Palestinian flags in the audience this week in Basel, which holds a special place in Jewish and Zionist history. It was in Basel where, on Aug. 29, 1897, Theodor Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress. Switzerland was also where Raphael spent three years as a young child.
Last year, Eurovision forced Israel to rewrite its song, “Hurricane,” which was performed by Eden Golan, because it was deemed too political. “I’m 100% focused on the music, I’m 100% focused on my song,” Raphael said in an interview with The Times of Israel in March. TOI claimed that Raphael was adopting a “carefully apolitical tone” ahead of the song contest.
Currently, 72 former Eurovision contestants have called for Israel to be banned from the competition. Ireland has asked to meet with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to discuss Israel’s inclusion in the annual contest. Israel has won Eurovision four times: 1978, 1979, 1998 and 2018.
In the long scheme of things, with a seven-front war, excruciating loss, a country burdened with mass Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and a renewed call for tens of thousands of IDF reservists to reenter Gaza, does one word in a European song contest in which last year’s Israeli representative, Golan, was booed and harassed, truly matter?
“I always tried to put in my students a love of the language and Jewish tradition, history and culture,” said Halperin. “I know the mistake was a minor thing, not only in relation to Eurovision, but in general. But after they corrected the song, I emailed them a beautiful quote in Hebrew that there was ‘a restoration of the crown to its former glory.’”
Halperin, who was born in Poland and moved to Israel as a little girl, is so passionate about the Hebrew language that in 2006, she accepted an offer by a Franciscan monk to establish a Hebrew department at the Higher School of Hebrew Philology in the historic Polish town of Toruń. She taught at the university until 2013.
Given her love of language, it is no surprise that Halperin’s daughter, Shirley, is also a wordsmith. She is currently the co-editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, after having served at Los Angeles Magazine, Variety, and many other magazines. “As an appreciator of language, it thrills me to no end that my mom — aka מורה רבקה — is having her peak Hebrew teacher moment,” Shirley told The Journal. “For once, I’m glad she’s correcting someone other than me!”
Halperin believes that a lack of familiarity with one’s mother tongue is not unique to Hebrew. “Like in many other languages, the younger generations introduce words in English into their everyday speech, which degrades the purity of the Hebrew language,” she lamented. “And it’s not just slang and social media; hosts and pundits on television insert English phrases interchangeably, and these are the people who were trained in proper grammar and usage.”
She continued, “Hebrew is based on the biblical language. But even on television, long viewed as a fortress of proper speech, as these ways of speaking become normalized, authentic Hebrew loses in the proposition.” For Halperin, the distance “from the roots of the language stretches even farther. Not when citations from the Bible contain mistakes; that’s a big no-no from this linguist’s point of view. [But] Hebrew isn’t just a language, it’s also tradition and culture, and that’s why I couldn’t let the mistake go.”
Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker, and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X and Instagram @TabbyRefael
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