Last night, a torrid downpour cooled off the hot-tempered evening rush hour before we headed out for dinner with German (pronounced Herman) Vaisman, the founder of Keshet, one of two lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires. You know a city’s Jewish community is vibrant when it has not one but two gay Jewish organizations.

I know German through my participation in two sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping global mafias—the gay one and the Jewish one. Granted, these mafias do not generally extort money or leave horse heads in people’s beds (at least not that I know of), but they do form a network of mutual, communal interdependence among those who identify a certain way.

Wherever I travel, I know that I’ll have some form of community by networking with one of these two groups—or, as with this trip, both. In Paris, for example, I may end up in a gay bar and soon after have invitations to parties hosted by local gay men. During the day, I may head to Paris’s MLove Without Borders: Jerusalem WorldPrideedem Library and be invited to an evening of Yiddish poetry. And then I am expected to serve as host for each network when people visit my hometown of Denver, which is, I’ll grant you, a bit less frequented than Paris. (I didn’t say either network entailed equal give-and-take.)

And sometimes, these networks align perfectly. Enter German, whom I met last summer in Jerusalem at the WorldPride festival, and who in the past two months had hosted in Buenos Aires no fewer than five other members of the international gay Jewish mafia. (See how this works?)

In ten minutes, German made me realize that the lachrymose itinerary I followed in my last dispatch was exactly the kind favored by Jewish travelers—one that revels in memorials, rather than in people. He told us about Keshet, which shows films, sponsors lectures, and considers itself more activist-oriented and political than its counterpart, the queer Jewish social network known as JAG, (pronounced chag, as in the Hebrew for “holiday.” The groups sponsored events for Purim, which passed a week ago, and will be hosting seders for Pesach, which takes place after I leave, so during my stay in Buenos Aires I won’t get to participate in the group’s activities.

As with most Jewish communal activists I have met, German is a volunteer. By day, he is an architect with his own firm. Relying on volunteers for such high-level Jewish communal work has clearly exhausted many of Buenos Aires’ most promising younger Jewish activists. German maintains Keshet’s website and hosts film evenings once in a while, but had desperately wanted to organize an event around my visit (a gay mafia writer/scholar is coming to town…must organize an event), but was too exhausted with his architecture business and just wasn’t able to do it.

Perhaps the most unusual group German told me about is Yok, which German described as a Heeb Magazine–type network that sponsors what we in the States now call “public space Judaism.” On Tuesday night, German had invited me to a cultural center, not a Jewish one mind you, to attend a Yok book discussion called “The Rubble of Humanism.”

Since I had seen enough real rubble for one day, and really preferred sitting in a restaurant with a glass ofHipsterism Ain't Just for Pischers: The baby boomers of Yok are too cool for shul wine to hearing two scholars drone on about the death of humanism, I politely declined. At dinner, German gave me more details about Yok, which fashions itself a hipster, New York–style Heeb-Reboot-Jewcy Jewish cultural network, but is in fact made up of 50-something Jewish intellectuals too “hip” for synagogues or other Jewish institutions. Not exactly what Heeb et al. has in mind, but frankly, I thought it sounded rather cool that baby-boomer Argentinean Jews established their own age-appropriate Heeb. (What the hell “Yok” means not even German knew!)

After an amazing meal with a piece of steak bigger than my head, we parted ways with plans for a wild Friday night—at Comunidad Bet El, a well-known Conservative/Masorti synagague…more on that in my next dispatch.

Next: Running from the police in Shmattaville