Searching for Zion

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman’s quest for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.

At the age of twenty-three, award-winning writer Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of "Zion" as a place black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. Now in Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is same she asks herself: have you found the home you’re looking for?

On her ten-year journey back in time and around the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau wanders to Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family—people that have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with historical and cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.

“Raboteau’s labyrinthine account of her odyssey to reconcile her blackness with the spiritual quest for Jerusalem is a masterpiece.” —Kirkus Reviews on the essay that became Searching for Zion

Praise for The Professor’s Daughter:

“A bolt of energy . . . Fearless and lyrically inventive, Raboteau is a writer to watch.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Engaging . . . Takes up the fundamental American obsession with racial categorization and acknowledges the claims that the history of such categorization makes on the individual.” —James Smethurst,Chicago Tribune

“[Raboteau’s] prose is vibrant with life. . . . Her timing is excellent, her humor is wry, her voice is on point, and her eye works with laser-like precision. [Her] sensitivity to life and to people is nothing short of astounding.” —Francesca Wodtke, San Francisco Chronicle

“I much admire [her] prose, the fierce intelligence, the way she looks race straight in the eye and yet creates characters that are all fully human.”—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Raboteau possesses what is rare in this age, an adventurer’s spirit. She does not seek a thrill, speed, the buzz of fear. She seeks a home for her own expansive spirit, to know more and to be comfortable with knowing less.”—Percival Everett