When National Anthems Matter

Gal Beckerman May 17, 2012

We’ve been thinking here a lot about the Israeli national anthem these days, and experimenting with some alternatives. But it’s also useful to be reminded why an anthem means so much to its citizens on a visceral, emotional level. And reminded we were when sent this feelgood of feelgood stories today.

A wheel-chair bound Israeli woman, Moran Samuel, who is also a star athlete in the paralympic world, recently won a rowing competition in Italy. When she stood in front of the crowd to receive her prize, an anthem that was not the Hatikvah came blasting over the loudspeakers (something, in fact, that sounded a bit like disco). Unfazed, Samuel quickly asked for the microphone and…Well, watch it.

Gal Beckerman was a staff writer and then the Forward’s opinion editor until 2014. He was previously an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review where he wrote essays and media criticism. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award and the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, as well as being named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Follow Gal on Twitter at @galbeckerman

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

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