I was having dinner with a friend who said half-jokingly that podcasts were his new go-to, and that he hardly reads anymore. We do live in a podcast universe in which folks glean the news, get sport recaps and delve into true crime during a commute (hopefully just in cars or on the T, not by bike). Many are informal and chatty, sometimes with a smug monotony. The new podcast “The Rabbis Go South,” by North Cambridge husband and wife documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and Gerald Peary, falls into the category of professionally produced journalism, shining a light on a little-revisited footnote to the Civil Rights Movement: when a contingent of 16 rabbis partook in acts of civil disobedience alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference against segregation and racism in St. Augustine, Florida.
From the first episode, which dropped two Mondays ago, we learn how and why the rabbis were invited by MLK to St. Augustine and that Young, the future mayor of Atlanta, was badly beaten there by a mob of segregationists. The seven-part series, which brings an unflinching lens to a highly tumultuous period of U.S. history, was inspired by the memories of Rabbi Allen Secher, whom Geller and Peary met while making their 2019 film, “The Rabbi Goes West,” in which Secher fought white supremacists threatening his hometown of Whitefish, Montana. Secher, now in his 80s, was also one of the rabbis who went to St. Augustine, but Geller and Peary didn’t know that during the making of their film. “He called one day,” Peary said in interview, “and said to Amy and me, ‘I’ve got a great story, and can you please tell it while I‘m still on this earth? Feeling an obligation, we researched what happened in St. Augustine and, finding it both exciting and inspirational, agreed to follow Secher’s wishes.”
The project began as a film, but Peary – who was raised in the segregated South – noted that brought logistical challenges. “The footage from 1964 was very, very limited. There was literally 30 seconds of film that exists of the rabbis being arrested, and some of our people are quite old in this film, and when we interviewed them they were a bit slow in talking and there were long gaps in what they were saying,” Peary said. That wasn’t a problem in editing the audio for a podcast. “What they were saying was pretty great. When we took it and and cut out the long pauses, it was quite wonderful.”
One of the project’s main expenditures was that sound editing, said Geller, an assistant professor of production at Boston University’s School of Communication. They turned to senior sound technician Gary Waleik, who had worked for decades at WBUR. The funding for the project came from stitching together private donations and grants; the final product is likely to be just under $60,000.
The podcast is tight not only in production and content, but in length, with each episode about 16 minutes long. “Someone told me great podcasts provide a lot of rich information in the time it takes to commute to work.” Geller said. “And so we internalized that and opted for a tight historical lens, and that felt like 15 to 20 minutes.”
Each episode has a mix of historical clips, interviews and a narrative back-and-forth between Geller and Peary lending context and perspective. Of the 16 rabbis, only Jerry Goldstein is alive apart from Secher. Both are interviewed for the podcast with several still-surviving African-American participants in the 1964 events in St. Augustine.
For Geller and Peary, the research process was intense and illuminating. They discovered that St. Augustine was similar in scope and significance to pillars of resistance in the Civil Rights movement such as Selma and Mobile, Alabama. “As we Jews say, it was a kind of mitzvah to tell about Secher and the other rabbis,” Peary said. “I also had a special interest in what happened in Florida because I grew up Jewish in Columbia, South Carolina, part of the segregated South.”
Though Peary had narrated a documentary, the podcast format presented a learning curve for the hosts. “Words looked good on paper,” Geller said, “but sometimes we tripped and stumbled saying them aloud. We’d have to rewrite for pronunciation and enunciation.” And they would “pass the baton” of who spoke the narrative far faster than they’d anticipated. Peary: “Sometimes one of us reading aloud even just a paragraph would start to drag, become boring. Switching quicker to the other person gave the narrative juice, made it engaging anew.”
The third episode of “The Rabbis Go South,” called “The Night March,” drops Monday. Future episodes such as “Why it Matters” (coming Oct. 28) explores what has changed – and what hasn’t. You can find “The Rabbis Go South” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms. It’s released by Hub & Spoke, a locally incubated platform for independent narrative podcasts.
This post was updated Sept. 30, 2024, to adjust a budget figure and correct references to Hub & Spoke.
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