Yes, “I Gotta Feeling” By the Black Eyed Peas Has a Jewish Backstory

On June 15, 2009, I was finalizing the cupcake order (again, it was 2009) for my wedding in two weeks when something incredible happened: I heard the words “mazel tov” on the radio in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

This was the summer of many monumental events: In two weeks I would marry a guy I had met at my college Hillel four years earlier. In ten days Michael Jackson would die, cementing his music as the soundtrack to our Irish honeymoon. But that day, “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas had just dropped, and as anyone who has attended a bar or bat mitzvah party since the summer of 2009 knows, the song includes the line “Fill up my cup/mazel tov (l’chaim!).”

Not to be dramatic, but after months of frustration trying to plan a Jewish wedding in South Louisiana — an event so rare that no vendors had the infrastructure in place to take on a Sunday wedding — to hear Hebrew on the radio was shocking. Healing, even. Ultimately, the song was too new to make an impact at my wedding, but these days it’s a staple on dance floors of all kinds, especially Jewish life cycle events. In an interview last month, Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am explained that yes, this was by design.

“So before ‘I’ve got a Feeling,’ we would play, like, huge weddings,” Will.i.am said on Visionaries Moments, a new series from UPROXX, the digital media company of which he is a part owner. “I noticed that between weddings, celebrative events, bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, there’s like a certain playlist that plays. They’re playing ‘Celebration.’ They’re playing ‘We Are Family,’ ‘Good times.’ I’m like, ‘Yo, I need a song that goes in there.’”

The Black Eyed Peas achieved that and more: “I Gotta Feeling” won a Grammy, broke multiple music industry records and in 2025 was certified diamond, which means it has sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. In the UPROXX interview, Will.i.am goes even deeper into how the phrase mazel tov made its way into the song. 

“The math for that was ‘Psycho killer,’” he said, referring to The Talking Heads song whose chorus starts with “Psycho Killer/Qu’est-ce que c’est?” “Four syllables in English, then three syllables in a different language.” Even if people don’t know what the words mean, he said, they recognize the cadence.

“That type of songwriting recipe — I love breaking things down like that.”

Once he had written the line, Will.i.am ran it by one of his childhood friends, Binyamin. The Hebrew, he said, was a nod to Binyamin’s dad.

“We made our first demo in his bedroom. And his dad, Ami, was really nice to us. And I always wanted to tell Ami thank you. So I’m like yo, [Binyamin], check this out.”

Binyamin had notes on the original line, which was just “Fill up my cup/mazel tov.”

“He’s like, well it’s fill up my cup, l’chaim, not mazel tov.”

So Will.i.am added a “l’chaim” to the second chorus  and Binyamin gave it his seal of approval. “He was like, ‘yeah, that’ll work.’”

In 2025, the account @organizermemes posted on X: “Unironically the best time to be Jewish in the last 2000 years was very clearly 2009 when the black eyed peas included the line ‘fill up my cup, Mazel tov.’” As a young bridezilla having a religious experience in my Toyota Prius, I 100% agree. L’chaim!