Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion uses listeners all over the world in an unexpected experience of beliefs. Both one woman’s search for a location to contact “house” and an investigation into a people’s seek out the Promised Property, this landmark work is usually a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement. At twenty-three, Raboteau journeyed to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend seemed to have found a location to belong, Raboteau couldn’t state the same for about Searching for Zion herself. Being a biracial female from a nation still divided along racial lines, she’d hardly ever felt in the home in America. But as a reggae enthusiast and the child of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion simply because a place dark people yearned to become. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She recognized it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than physical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau searched for other black communities that had remaining home in search of a Promised Land. Her question on their behalf is the same she asks herself: have you found the house you’re looking for? On her ten-year journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age group of Obama, Raboteau wanders through Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the Southern United States to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of “black Zionists.” She foretells Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Hurricane Katrina transplants from her own family – individuals who have risked everything searching for territory that’s really difficult to define and harder to inhabit. In Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our concepts of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and nation within a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull from the story of exodus.