Biographical note

Arnold Dashefsky, Ph.D. served as the inaugural holder of the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he is now emeritus. He is the co-author or editor of ten books, including Americans Abroad, Charitable Choices, Ethnic Identification Among American Jews, among others, as well as numerous scholarly articles. A former associate head of the sociology department, he was the founding director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, located in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, and is the director emeritus and current senior academic consultant of the Berman Jewish DataBank.
Ira M. Sheskin, Ph.D. is the director of the Jewish Demography Project of the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami and professor and chair of geography at the same institution.He has completed close to 50 major Jewish community studies for Jewish Federations throughout the country and was a member of the National Technical Advisory Committee of the Jewish Federations of North America from 1988 to 2003, which completed both the 1990 and 2000-01 National Jewish Population Surveys. His publications include books entitled Survey Research for Geographers, How Jewish Communities Differ, and Comparisons of Jewish Communities: A Compendium of Tables and Bar Charts.