Lately, I've been suffering from a little bit of "Argentinitis" which is what my wife and I call how we feel when we really wish we could be in Argentina right away. The spanish pronunciation would be "Ar-hen'-tee-nee-tees". The best medicine for me is to tune in to one of the various Argentine radio or TV stations that are available live on the internet.

This morning I was listening to Radio Jai "pronounced "Chai" with the Hebrew guttural "ch" meaning "life") and there was an interview with someone who apparently plays in a Klezmer band who was going to be performing in Buenos Aires. It's hard me to concentrate super-well on the Spanish when I'm working, but I did hear something about "California" and "movie". At the end of the interview I was trying to catch the guy's name, but all I heard was "Gustavo". I figured, "how many Argentine klezmer musicians can there be in the world named Gustavo"?



So I did a search on the internet and it was obvious that the interviewee was Gustavo Bulgach of Klezmer Juice. He is Argentine-born and he plays clarinet for the band which is based in Los Angeles. As it turns out, it is his band that is on the soundtrack for "Wedding Crashers" with their version of Hava Nagila which is played when the two lead characters crash a Jewish wedding at the beginning of the film.

I just love that I was able to learn all of that just by accident.

Another interesting topic that they were discussing yesterday was that they didn't understand how the American Jewish community could stand for a production like "The Producers" in its handling of Hitler and the Nazis. The show is now playing on Av. Correientes which is Buenos Aires' version of Broadway and apparently it's more difficult for the Argentina Jewish community to talk about comfortably. I wanted to call to explain that here, the Nazis were everyone's enemy and can now be ridiculed comfortably and that the Jewish community feels no real physical threat, even from Neo-Nazis. Argentina, has a somewhat different history....