Introducing The Rabbis Go South from the Hub & Spoke Expo

Don't worry, the next regular season of Soonish is still coming. But meanwhile I wanted to bring you something really special that I think you’ll like. It's first episode of a new podcast from Hub & Spoke called The Rabbis Go South. It’s a documentary that we’re presenting as part of a new project we’ve cooked up called the Hub & Spoke Expo.

The Expo is our way of working with independent audio creators who are making limited-run series, as opposed to the ongoing podcasts that make up the rest of the collective. The Rabbis Go South is our very first Expo series, and the creators Amy Geller and Gerald Perry released the first episode just this week.

We’re really proud that we can help get the show out to the world, because it tells the story of an important but little-known episode in the history of the pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. You’ve heard of the march in Selma and the bus boycotts in Montgomery. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Black civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King Jr. also faced vicious opposition to their effort to integrate the deeply segregated city of St. Augustine, Florida. As part of a strategy to bring as much media attention as he could to the situation in St. Augustine, Dr. King called on friends from the Jewish community to come to Florida to participate in marches and other actions. Sixteen rabbis heeded that call, and they were so successful at getting under the skin of local law enforcement that they all ended up in a jail run by sheriff’s deputies who were also leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan. Amy and Gerry went out and talked to the surviving members of that group about why they did what they did to help their Black compatriots, and what this rare moment of Black-Jewish cooperation can teach us today.

So I hope you enjoy this first episode, and if you do you can hear the rest of the story in new episodes of The Rabbis Go South, coming out every Monday from now through late October. You can find it at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts.