Podcasts about raboteau

Emily Raboteau reads with purpose, a clear voice, and a conversational tone that works well for the personal essays on “Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse'” in this satisfying audiobook. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Alan Minskoff discuss how Raboteau moves her prose and delivery between her varied subjects; a sense of wonder at identifying birds, exasperation at dealing with New York City real estate, and empathy for a water-starved Palestinian family. The lessons in this text are hard earned and elegantly expressed. Read the full review of the audiobook on AudioFile's website. Published by Macmillan Audio. Discover thousands of audiobook reviews and more at AudioFile's website. Support for AudioFile's Sound Reviews comes from Hachette Audio, and the audiobook edition of RELENTLESS by Luis A Miranda Jr, featuring a foreword read by none other than Lin-Manuel Miranda. To find out more about this, and any other Hachette Audio productions, please visit www.hachetteaudio.com, or @HachetteAudio  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a parent, how do you navigate – and feel hope – raising kids through a pandemic, a climate crisis and with police brutality in the news? That's the question at the center of Emily Raboteau's new book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against 'The Apocalypse.' In today's episode, Raboteau tells Here & Now's Celeste Headlee what she learned about radical care, resilience and interdependence through the people she met in her community and in her travels, and how she thinks about parenting through personal and global hardships. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookofthedayLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

After a ~10-year gap, Emily Raboteau rejoins the show to celebrate her amazing new essay collection, LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" (Holt). We talk about her sparkbird and the Audubon Mural Project in Washington Heights that center the book, her transformation into a climate activist, the joy of the flaneuse, her scavenger hunt for Justin Brice Guariglia's environmental art, and the idea of pain with a purpose. We also get into the differences between mothering & motherhood, the reason she put "the Apocalypse" in quotes in her subtitle, how COVID lockdown made her realize her kids' lives had been overscheduled (and how lockdown gave them some room to breathe), and the nor'easter-battered book-event in Princeton that corroborated her book's community-thesis. Plus we discuss her dream of interviewing Vivian Gornick, how we need to overcome pandemic-amnesia, the place her children really want to visit, how she's changed as a writer since we last talked, what the difference is between surviving and living, and a lot more. Follow Emily on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

Writer Emily Raboteau joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about mothering in the face of climate change and systemic inequality. Raboteau discusses the difference between “resilience” and “trauma-informed growth,” and considers which one more realistically describes how people react to devastation. She also reflects on writing about Indigenous communities and histories, developing language to capture shifting environmental realities, and the intersections of climate and racial justice. Finally, she explains the influence of her late father, Albert Raboteau, a groundbreaking professor of African American religion, on her community-minded approach to these topics. She reads from Lessons for Survival, her new collection of essays about care and mothering in the climate crisis.  To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf. Emily Raboteau Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora The Professor's Daughter “Climate Signs”|The New York Review of Books, February 1, 2019 “Lessons in Survival”|The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019 “The Unequal Racial Burdens of Rising Seas”|The New York Times, April 10, 2023 “Gutbucket”|Orion Magazine Others: Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 2, Episode 15: “Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad Tell a Different Kind of Climate Change Story” “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC”|Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, October 2018 “UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It's Actually Worse Than That” by David Wallace-Wells|New York Magazine, October 10, 2018 The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells “Young Readers Ask: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells” by Geronimo Lavalle|Orion Magazine, April 9, 2019 “In Pictures: New York Under a Haze of Wildfire Smoke|Le Monde, June 7, 2023 Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush “Why Indonesia Is Shifting Its Capital From Jakarta”|Bloomberg, August 24, 2019 “Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities”|Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, September 2019 “Managed Retreat through Voluntary Buyouts of Flood-Prone Properties” by Katherine J. Mach et. al.|Science Advances, October 9, 2019 “Climate Change Isn't the First Existential Threat” by Mary Annaïse Heglar|ZORA, February 18, 2019 Anya Kamenetz “‘Culture Will Be Eroded': Climate Crisis Threatens to Flood Harriet Tubman Park”|The Guardian, November 23, 2019 Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford and Annette Gordon-Reed Justin Brice Guariglia Albert Raboteau Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South by Albert Raboteau Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick came on the show to discuss new books about life in our age of the polycrisis. One of these was Emily Raboteau's much acclaimed Lessons For Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”. So how, exactly, I asked the Bronx based Raboteau, do you mother against “the apocalypse”? And what does Raboteau, a amateur photographer and birdwatcher, have in common with Christian Cooper, the Central Park birdwatcher, who appeared on the show last year?Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her books are Lessons for Survival, Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor's Daughter. Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau's writing has recently appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists' New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, once known as “the poor man's Harvard.” She lives in the Bronx.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Many people share this writer's admiration of John James Audubon as a naturalist and an artist, especially his magisterial Birds of America. “But fewer people know about him as a slave owner and a white supremacist,” she says. Birds, beauty, climate change, and racial justice: it's complicated. And delightfully so. Produced with Orion Magazine.

A confronting - and deeply personal - look at the roots of racial division in the US. --- “We still live under the long shadow of the plantation. Indeed, freedoms have been spread to a larger group of people over time, but that spread has been at the cost of ongoing oppression of black people in ways that have become very apparent thanks to video cams and cell phones that betray the brutality of the police state that we sometimes live in as black people.” With the events of recent weeks – the Death of George Floyd, the Black lives matter protests all over the U.S. and around the world, including here in Australia, we felt this episode would be a good one to revisit. When we first posted it, we were reflecting on the death of black teenager Travon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman and the fallout from that tragedy. Sadly, it seems not much has changed. In this episode of Life & Faith, Professor Albert J. Raboteau from Princeton University, an expert in the African-American religious experience, walks us through the history of race relations in the US, and the deep roots of racial division – from the plantations to the Black Lives Matter movement today. But he’s not just an expert – Professor Raboteau has lived the reality of racism as well: “My father was killed by a white man in Mississippi, three months before I was born. The white man who killed him was never tried. He claimed self-defence and he wasn’t indicted even. … When I was 17 and getting ready to go off to college, [my mother and stepfather] sat me down and, for the first time, explained to me what had happened.  They said, ‘The reason we didn’t tell you before was we didn’t want you to grow up hating white people’.” — For The Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined is available here: https://www.publicchristianity.org/fortheloveofgod/

The Republican-led Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee held a remote hearing on the country's handling of the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday. Committee Chair Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Ranking Member Sen. Patty Murry (D-WA) and four witnesses — Stephen Hahn, head of the Food and Drug Administration; Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services who is in charge of coronavirus testing; and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — appeared remotely in the unusual session. Each member of the committee had a five-minute period to ask questions and receive answers. What did we learn from this?It amazes me. No matter how much we discuss this, no matter how egregious this is and how undemocratic it is, Republicans and sometimes Democrats continue to purge voters from the rolls. "American civil rights groups on Monday moved to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the right-wing activist group Judicial Watch that critics warn could result in 'the unnecessary and potentially disenfranchising purges' of voter rolls in three Pennsylvania counties ahead of the November elections," Common Dreams reported Monday. How concerned should we be about what's going on?There's a great article in MintPress News titled "How Big Wireless Lobbied Governments to Build 5G For Citizen Data Collection and Surveillance." In it, Derick Broze says, "While selling 5G technology to the public as a means for faster downloads, Big Wireless — comprising a web of telecom companies, lobbyists and law firms — is spending millions to lobby governments the world over to implement the next generation of cellular technology because of its potential for data collection and surveillance of citizens." What are we to make of this?Why does the US keep trying and failing to deport a former CIA operative back to Haiti? Who is Emmanuel “Toto” Constant? First, what was the Raboteau massacre, and how does this relate to the 1991 US-backed coup that forced President Jean-Bertrande Aristide out of Haiti?GUESTS:Dr. Yolandra Hancock — Board-certified pediatrician and obesity medicine specialist who combines her hands-on clinical experience and public health expertise with her passion for building vibrant families and communities by providing patient-empowering, best-in-class health and wellness care to children and adolescents who are fighting childhood obesity. Greg Palast — Award-winning investigative reporter featured in The Guardian, Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, BBC and other high profile media outlets. He covered Venezuela for The Guardian and BBC Television's "Newsnight." His BBC reports are the basis of his film "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."Derrick Broze — Investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, activist, and author from Houston, Texas. He is the founder of The Conscious Resistance Network.Raul Diego — MintPress News staff writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.

Mark and Matthew discuss the first Baptist Missionary George Liele and the influence of his ministry.    Recommended reading on the topics discussed in this episode:   Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South by Albert J. Raboteau   The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness by H. Leon McBeth   Missionaries You Should Know: George Liele by Lesley Hildreth  

In this episode of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, novelists Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad discuss telling the stories of climate change with hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell. Raboteau talks about her recent NYRB article, "Climate Signs," and El Akkad shares how his history as a journalist connects to his novel, American War,   Readings for the Episode: ●      “Climate Signs” by Emily Raboteau, New York Review Daily ●      The Professor's Daughter  by Emily Raboteau ●      Searching for Zion  by Emily Raboteau ●      American War  by Omar El Akkad ●      Gold Fame Citrus  by Claire Vaye Watkins ●      “Flying Cars Could Save us from Climate Change,” by Jen Christensen, CNN ●      “Climate Change: European Team to drill for ‘oldest' ice in Antarctica” by Jonathan Amos, BBC ●      “Atchafalaya”  by John McPhee, The New Yorker ●      The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming  by David Wallace-Wells ●      “There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us,” by Rob Ludacer and Jessica Orwig, Business Insider ●      "Young Readers Ask: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells," by Geronimo LaValle, Orion Magazine ●      “As We Approach the City,” by Mik Awake, The Common ●      “The Climate Museum Launches Pun-Filled Art Installations Across the City,” by Katie Brown, Medium/NYU Local ●      “‘Hand that's feeding the world is getting bit.' Farmers cope with floods, trade war” by Crystal Thomas and Bryan Lowery, The Kansas City Star ●      “Senator uses Star Wars posters, image of Reagan riding a dinosaur to blast Green New Deal,” by Christal Hayes, USA Today ●      Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton ●      Horizon, by Barry Lopez ●      The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben Guests: ·       Emily Raboteau ·       Omar El Akkad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Therese Taylor-Stinson is the co-editor of Embodied Spirits: Stories of Spiritual Directors of Color, and the editor of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around — Stories of Contemplation and Justice. She is an ordained deacon and elder in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), a lay pastoral caregiver, and a graduate of and an associate faculty member of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, where she previously served as a member of the board. She is the founder of the Spiritual Directors of Color Network, an international, ecumenical/interfaith association of persons of color with a ministry of spiritual accompaniment. A native of Washington DC, she now lives in Maryland. Her ministry, like her books, explores the intersection of contemplative spirituality and the ongoing struggle for social justice and the dismantling of racism. I've always loved nature, I love trees... I love the ocean, I love the sunrise and the moonrise... those kinds of things bring me into silence in a kind of pondering and sitting with what we call 'God', but to me is more 'Mystery'." — Therese Taylor-Stinson In this first part of a two-part episode, Therese shares with us her early experience of contemplative silence, formed by her education in Catholic schools as well as her early encounters with the silence of nature. She goes on to show how her journey as a contemplative and a spiritual director has impacted her experience as a woman of color. Of particular interest is her insights into the contemplative dimension of the civil rights movement, particularly in terms of the under-appreciated contribution of Howard Thurman. "For some people of color, silence is uncomfortable — it feels oppressive or imposing,  it makes them go places or feel things they're not ready for, or that they aren't ready to express to me. We have to be really careful with silence... I don't know that silence is a requirement to find that still place within." — Therese Taylor-Stinson In the second half of today's episode, Therese offers insight into the contribution of people of color, not only to contemplative spirituality, but to Christianity as a whole — and how those contributions have been erased from history through the dynamics of racism — leading to a "silencing" toxic in its nature. This is part one of a two-part interview; to hear the second part of this conversation, click here. To learn more about the Spiritual Directors of Color Network, visit www.sdcnetwork.org. Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode: Therese Taylor-Stinson (ed.), Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around — Stories of Contemplation and Justice (includes essays by Jacqueline Smith-Crooks, Lerita Coleman Brown, Maisie Sparks, Jung Eun Sophia Park, Soyinka Rahim, and Ineda P. Adesanya, among others) Therese Taylor-Stinson et al. (editors), Embodied Spirits: Stories of Spiritual Directors of Color Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited Lerita Coleman Brown, When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom Maisie Sparks, Holy Shakespeare! Jung Eun Sophia Park, Border-Crossing Spirituality: Transformation in the Borderland  Soyinka Rahim, Bibo Love Ineda P. Adesanya, Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation and Liberation Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church Desert Fathers and Mothers, Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Tilden Edwards, Living in the Presence Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel John Main, Door to Silence: An Anthology for Meditation Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religions 

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South remains a classic in the study of African American history and religion. In a new chapter in this anniversary edition, author Albert J. Raboteau reflects upon the origins of the book, the reactions to it over the past twenty-five years, and how he would write it differently today. Using a variety of first and second-hand sources-- some objective, some personal, all riveting-- Raboteau analyzes the transformation of the African religions into evangelical Christianity. He presents the narratives of the slaves themselves, as well as missionary reports, travel accounts, folklore, black autobiographies, and the journals of white observers to describe the day-to-day religious life in the slave communities. Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South is a must-read for anyone wanting a full picture of this "invisible institution."Albert J. Raboteau who came to Princeton in 1982, is a specialist in American religious history. His research and teaching have focused on American Catholic history, African-American religious movements and currently, he is working on the place of beauty in the history of Eastern and Western Christian Spirituality. He has written Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History, Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, and most recently American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice. He was the first recipient of the J.W.C. Pennington Award from the University of Heidelberg and last Fall delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. He retired in June, 2013.Yvonne Chireau is the Department of Religion Chair at Swarthmore College and is an authority on African-based religions such as Santeria and Voodoo in America, religion and healing, and black American religion. She is also interested in religion and comics, manga, and graphic novels. The author of Black Magic: African American Religion and the Conjuring Tradition, she has also co-edited, with Nathaniel Deutsch, Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism. She received her B.A from Mount Holyoke College, her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Albert J. Raboteau, Ph.D., is the Henry Putnam Professor Emeritus of Religion at Princeton University and a leading expert on African American religious history. Before Raboteau was born, his father, Albert Jordy Raboteau (1899–1943), was killed in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, by a white man who was never convicted of the crime. His mother moved from the South, where she was a teacher, to find a better place for her children. She remarried an African-American priest, who taught Raboteau Latin and Greek and helped him to focus on church and education. Accepted into college at the age of sixteen, Raboteau was awarded a BA by Loyola University in 1964 and an MA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He then studied at the Yale Graduate Program in Religious Studies, receiving his PhD in 1974. Raboteau's dissertation, later revised and published as the book Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South, was published just as the black studies movement was gaining steam in the 1970s. In 1982 Princeton University hired Raboteau, first as a visiting professor and then as full-time faculty. He is currently (2009) Henry W. Putnam Professor Emeritus of Religion.

Albert J. Raboteau, Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion Emeritus, Princeton University, gave the 2017 Ruth Knee Lecture on Spirituality and Social Work at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration on February 28, 2017. In June 2015, the murder of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina by a white supremacist as they attended an evening Bible study class shocked the nation. The reactions of some of the family members of the slain amazed many as they expressed forgiveness for the killer. Raboteau’s lecture examined the long history of forgiveness in the African-American Church tradition, stretching from slavery to the present day, to help explain their amazing act. Albert J. Raboteau is a specialist in American religious history. His research and teaching have focused on American Catholic history, African-American religious movements, and the place of beauty in the history of Eastern and Western Christian Spirituality.

The U.N.'s Egregious Negligence in Causing the Cholera Epidemic in Haiti and its Refusal to Accept Responsibility and Provide Redress and the Legal and Political Issues Surrounding the U.N.'s Assertion of Diplomatic ImmunityDiscussion with Brian Concannon Jr. on the U.N.'s actions in causing, covering up and refusing to accept responsibility for the cholera epidemic in Haiti. We discuss the legal and policy issues behind the U.N.'s diplomatic immunity, including the Second Circuit's decision in Georges et. al. v. the U.N., the U.N. Charter, the 1946 Convention of the Privileges and Immunities of the U.N. and the Status of Forces Agreement with Haiti. We also discuss the U.N.'s obligations under the Convention and the Status of Forces Agreement and its refusal to perform its obligations of providing redress in Haiti and throughout its other peacekeeping missions. Additionally, we look at the application of customary international law and international human rights law to the U.N.'s actions, the problems of limiting standing to member states dependent on the U.N. for the U.N.'s violations as well as issues respecting the accountability of foreign N.G.O.s on the ground in Haiti and best practices for the future. Brian Concannon, Jr., is a human rights attorney and represents the plaintiffs in Georges et. al. v the U.N. He has represented numerous plaintiffs in front of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as aided the prosecution of the Raboteau massacre. Brian is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). Before founding IJDH, Brian co-managed the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and worked for the United Nations as a Human Rights Officer. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Health and Human Rights.

Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to show to talk about the many notions of “home" for black people. Along the way, we talk about the many notions of what constitutes a black person. As Ms. Raboteau discovered in the travels chronicled in her book — encompassing Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and America's deep south — there are a lot of ideas about who's black and what blackness means. "We reach for stories to be able to take risks." We also talk about churchgoing in New York City, what it's like to travel to Antarctica, why the story of Exodus is so pivotal in the black American experience, why Jewish book reviewers thought she was pulling a bait-and-switch, why she chose to explore her black roots instead of her white ones for this book, what motherhood means, and what it was like to give a talk about faith on behalf of Bobby McFerrin. Go listen!

The USU Religious Studies Program & USU History Department are sponsoring a symposium: Black Religious Experience in American History at USU on Oct 24-25. Speakers include Albert Raboteau, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Princeton, the foremost expert on the religion of the American slaves prior to Lincoln's emancipation.

At twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit a childhood friend who'd found a place to belong. As a biracial American woman, Raboteau couldn't say the same for herself. After meeting black Jews in Israel, she sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land, from Africa to Jamaica to the American South. In Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in an honest and brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.Emily Raboteau is an associate professor of English at City College of New York; the author of the novel, The Professor's Daughter; and a recent recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts award. Recorded On: Wednesday, February 6, 2013

About a decade ago, novelist Emily Raboteau went to Jerusalem to visit a childhood friend who’d made aliyah. The trip provoked yearnings in Raboteau, the biracial daughter of an African-American father and white mother, for a place where she could feel at home, a Zion of her own. Six years later, that yearning led her to embark on a long journey to learn more about those who leave everything behind in search of a better life in a place they feel they belong. Following in the footsteps of others in the African diaspora, she traveled back to Israel to talk to Ethiopian Jews and African Hebrew Israelites; to Jamaica and Ethiopia to meet with Rastafarians; and to Ghana, home to expats from the United States and elsewhere who wanted to return to the place from which their ancestors were forcibly deported as slaves. As she chronicles in her new book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau learned how difficult... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.