Nora Gerard's Oral History

Nora Gerard, Director of CBS News and former Director of Programs at the Yiddish Book Center, was interviewed by Pauline Katz on October 12, 2010 at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Nora Gerard, Program Director at the Yiddish Book Center, discusses her career, family and the Jewish intersections throughout her life. Sharing her experiences just starting out in television as a typist for a soap opera and eventually working her way up to directing for CBS News in New York, she explains what her career experiences have meant to her thus far. Gerard also details her involvement with the community in Springfield through developing the Holocaust Center and Springfield Community Music Center. She concludes the interview by discussing her current work with the Yiddish Book Center and her relationship to the Yiddish language and its surrounding culture. Nora's family came Belarus to America. She herself was born in Brooklyn, but moved to New Jersey when she was two. She jokes that her generation moved out of the cities while later generations seem to flock to the big cities. She talked about where she went to school and her out of college dream of being a documentary filmmaker. But the television is a business where you need to work from the ground up, and she remembers some of the jobs she had before working at CBS News. Nora explains that when her son was born, traveling back and forth to New York became too difficult so she moved to central Massachusetts she worked on many projects in Springfield Ma, one of which was a holocaust museum that caused her to reevaluate her Jewish identity. She says that that was what really got her on the path to the book center. She expands further on her path to the Yiddish Book Center by saying that the job of program director at the Book Center was the amalgamation of all the work she had done before. She goes on to say what some of her favorite programs at the book center are what she learns from the being in such a Yiddish environment every day.