In a journey of generations from Aden to Palestine to Ottawa, one Yemenite family encounters new and difficult realities: racism and war, rejection and divorce, resourceful survival and tragic death. -Yael Unterman, author of The Hidden of Things: Twelve Stories of Love & Longing

From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a “beautifully written and thought-provoking” memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun). A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned for. But while visiting 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, her question for them is the same one she keeps asking herself: have you found the home you’re looking for? In this American Book Award–winning inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement, Raboteau embarked on a ten-year journey around the globe and back in time to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of black Zionists. She talked to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews—all in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place, patriotism, dispossession, citizenship, and country in “an exceptionally beautiful . . . book about a search for the kind of home for which there is no straight route, the kind of home in which the journey itself is as revelatory as the destination” (Edwidge Danticat, author of The Farming of Bones).

"The son of a Jewish father and Baptist mother, Paul Wilbur grew up attending synagogue. In college he was transformed by a Baptist minister's teaching about a rabbi, Jesus, who fulfilled the promise of the Torah. As he grew in his relationship with Jesus, Wilbur was reintroduced to the God of the Old Testament and began exploring his Jewish heritage. Along the way, he discovered the power of Jewish worship traditions-the weekly Shabbat, with the power of Holy Communion and dedication to family, along with other high holy traditions and feast days. Observing those ancient rituals, now infused with the power of the Holy Spirit, Wilbur heard a sound that he describes as a "roar from Zion." As evangelicals came to understand and incorporate ancient Jewish worship practices in their home and church lives, miracles broke out, fathers assumed their roles as the head of their families, prodigal children returned home, and marriages were restored. What began with one man is now becoming a movement, with tens of thousands taking part"--

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands. Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning. This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.

For the Sake of Zion is a wonderful road map to one of the great journeys of human history the return of the Jewish people to Israel. Dr. Tuvia Book combines the head of a knowledgeable expert with the heart of a passionate educator to produce a volume rich in facts, ideas, and creative pedagogy.

Beyond Hate offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, and white supremacists with various popular cultural texts, including movies, music, television, sport, video games, and kitsch. Outlining the ways in which advocates of white power interpret popular cultural forms, and probing the emergent spaces of white power popular culture, it examines the paradoxical relationship that advocates of white supremacy have with popular culture, as they finding it to be an irresistible and repugnant reflection of social decay rooted in multiculturalism. Drawing on a range of new media sources, including websites, chat rooms, blogs and forums, this book explores the concerns expressed by advocates of white power, with regard to racial hierarchy and social order, the crisis of traditional American values, the perpetuation of liberal, feminist, elitist ideas, the degradation of the family and the fetishization of black men. What emerges is an understanding of the instruments of power in white supremacist discourses, in which a series of connections are drawn between popular culture, multiculturalism, sexual politics and state functions, all of which are seen to be working against white men. A richly illustrated study of the intersections of white power and popular culture in the contemporary U.S., and the use of use cyberspace by white supremacists as an imagined site of resistance, Beyond Hate will appeal to scholars of sociology and cultural studies with interests in race and ethnicity, popular culture and the discourses of the extreme right.

A Book of Mormons not only provides a fascinating glimpse into a religion that has taken center stage in the last presidential election, but will prompt insights into what living an encompassing religion means both individually and for the community trying to understand exactly "What does it mean to be a Mormon today?" Mormonism is at a crossroads, having been under the microscopic lens of the media for the past five years, even as Mormons young and old grapple with the openness and accessibility of The Information Age. Both the institutional church and its lay members are working to better define the faith for outsiders as well as within. This collection of essays from a broad swath of Mormons -- some who live their faith quietly, others who wrestle with how it colors their professional endeavors -- is an attempt to broaden perspectives about Mormons and demystifying stereotypes.