Searching for Zion Audiobook (Free)

Emily Raboteau’s Looking for Zion takes listeners around the world in an unexpected adventure of beliefs. Both one woman’s search for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Property, this landmark work is certainly a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement. At twenty-three, Raboteau traveled to Israel to go to her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a location to belong, Raboteau couldn’t say the same for about Searching for Zion herself. Like a biracial girl from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d under no circumstances felt in the home in the us. But like a reggae lover and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau understood of Zion simply because a place black people yearned to be. She’d found out about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She recognized it being a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual world rather than geographical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was amazed to discover black Jews. Influenced by their exodus, Raboteau searched for other black communities that had still left home in search of a Promised Property. Her question to them is the same she asks herself: have you found the house you’re looking for? On her behalf ten-year journey back in its history and across the globe, through the Bush years and in to the age group of Obama, Raboteau wanders through Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the Southern United States to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of “dark Zionists.” She foretells Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Hurricane Katrina transplants from her very own family – individuals who have risked everything in search of territory that is 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 inside a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the tale of exodus.