I’ve been thinking about Noam Bettan a lot this week.
If you haven’t been following Eurovision then you know Israel’s singer Noam Bettan stepped onto the stage in Vienna this year knowing exactly what was coming. Five countries had already boycotted the competition just because Israel was allowed to participate. The crowd had been booing Israeli performers for years. So Noam did something that stopped me in my tracks: he spent months rehearsing to recordings of people heckling him to prepare himself.
And then he walked out, smiled, sang his heart out, and finished second.
I watched that and I felt it in my whole body.
Because here’s the thing — as a Jewish woman, the experience of being misunderstood, dismissed, or deliberately excluded is not abstract to me. It’s personal. It’s generational. And when I see it playing out on a global stage, I notice.
But I also notice it every single day in the twice exceptional community.
The 2e kids who are told they’re “too much” and “not enough” in the same breath. The 2e adults who have spent a lifetime masking, compensating, and showing up to rooms that were never designed with them in mind. The parents who have been gaslit by the very systems that were supposed to help their children.
Sound familiar?
What Noam Bettan did — preparing for the noise so it couldn’t knock him off his song — is something I want every person in this community to be able to do.
Julie F. Skolnick, M.A., J.D. is the founder of With Understanding Comes Calm and the author of Gifted and Distractible: Understanding, Supporting, and Advocating for Your Twice Exceptional Child.
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