Davening at kever nasrallah

I just finished reading "Holy Beggars: A Journey from Haight Street to Jerusalem." The memoir follows the author in his journeys from being an anti-war hippie in San Francisco in the 1960s, to becoming a hasidic/modern orthodox Jew and a follower of the late rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.

I read the book because I was raised in an observant Jewish family, and have felt the strong pull of Jewish religiosity in my own life. When I was in middle school, my family moved to a modern orthodox neighborhood so we could attend a more religious synagogue. My favorite services were usually friday night kabbalat shabbat services, where many of the melodies that the congregation would sing were melodies composed by Carlebach. At almost any kabbalat services an individual would attend in the present, one would hear many Carlebach melodies. 

Another reason I was interested in this book was its intersection with left-wing politics. Generally, while reading this book I was very disappointed in the author's inability to connect the left-wing anti-war politics to anti-Zionism. The author sees no irony in protesting passionately against the war in Vietnam, and then visiting (decades later) friends who live in Israel and in the West Bank. My understanding is that in the late 1960s, many Jews split away from the Civil Rights movement as the Black Power movement became more prominent, and as many leading Black intellectuals connected the struggle against imperialism in Vietnam to the struggle against Zionism in Palestine. Many Jews (from what I understand) were alienated by these more radical politics, and unfortunately determined that colonialism was fine so long as Jews were implementing it. 

Generally, the characters in this memoir get too hopped up on Shlomo Carlebach's admittedly beautiful melodies and good vibes, and remain entirely blind to the violence of Zionism. I guess part of what makes me so interested in the late 1960s is how acutely it sparks imaginations of what could have been in the world had things played out slightly differently. This memoir features a scene of Shlomo Carlebach taking the stage at some kind of Be-In shortly after Allen Ginsberg. Maybe Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton were in the crowd that day as well. Gewalt! What a holy day that must have been!

Coopersmith's blindspot for Zionism is just consistently infuriating throughout the book. I really just wish I could time travel to the 1960s and wake these guys up out of their Zionist stupor, and make them understand that when the Black Panthers say that Zionism is racism, and that Zionism is imperialism, they are 100% correct. An anti-imperialist Shlomo Carlebach ... that would have been a force to reckon with.

Overall, I would give this book 2 or 2.5 stars out of 5. The years and characters it covers are very interesting to me as someone who is very interested in frumkeit, the 1960s, and anti-colonialism. There are a handful of genuinely well-written scenes where the author reflects on some of his marriages, and his struggles to synthesize his Jewish practice and his personal life. Overall, the author's myopia towards Zionism, as well as his hagiographic treatment of "Shlomo," makes the book fairly hard to get through at times, and it can also get pretty repetitive. If I want a proper treatment of spirituality and anti-colonialism, I will probably have to go daven at Syed Nasrallah's gravesite instead.