Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Watch This Mashup of ’70s Israeli Disco

Kutiman is always up to something interesting.

Image by Youtube

The Israeli musical artist (né Ophir Kutiel) is known for his inspired “ThruYOU” mashups of YouTube videos. Sitting at his home computer he is a cutting-edge composer, sampling snippets of sound from homemade movies to unite and blend disparate individuals from all corners of the globe into beautiful and totally unexpected ensembles.

One of his “ThruYou videos,” titled “My Favorite Color,” caught the attention of media outlets like Wired, CBS News and TechCrunch for its sophisticated jazz composition. Another, called “Thru Jerusalem,” created for the Jerusalem Season of Culture in 2011, involved Kutiman’s walking around Israel’s capital to film and record local musicians playing traditional and improvisational instruments.

His latest creation, “Israeli Groove Reconstructed,” delights fans of 1970s and early 1980s disco-era Israeli pop music. It’s a blast from the past, and if you watch and listen closely you’ll see and hear some of the of the biggest stars at the time, like Yehoram Gaon, Shlomo Artzi, Zohar Argov and Zvika Pick. A young Rivka Michaeli serves as our host throughout the piece.

Watch ‘Israeli Groove Reconstructed’:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.