[Review of] Richard Klayman. A Generation of Hope: 1929-1941

There would be little disagreement among students of American Jewry that we know relatively little about the experience of Jews living in the smaller cities and towns of this country. In recent years, the number of community studies has grown. Typically, however, the research site is a larger metropolis, or else a circumscribed neighborhood of Jewish settlement in a major urban center

The Rank of the Covariance Matrix of an Evanescent Field

Evanescent random fields arise as a component of the 2-D Wold decomposition of homogenous random fields. Besides their theoretical importance, evanescent random fields have a number of practical applications, such as in modeling the observed signal in the space time adaptive processing (STAP) of airborne radar data. In this paper we derive an expression for the rank of the low-rank covariance matrix of a finite dimension sample from an evanescent random field. It is shown that the rank of this covariance matrix is completely determined by the evanescent field spectral support parameters, alone. Thus, the problem of estimating the rank lends itself to a solution that avoids the need to estimate the rank from the sample covariance matrix. We show that this result can be immediately applied to considerably simplify the estimation of the rank of the interference covariance matrix in the STAP problem

Estimating Switching Costs and Oligopolistic Behavior

We present an empirical model of firm behavior in the presence of switching costs. Customers' transition probabilities, embedded in firms' value maximization, are used in a multi-period model to derive estimable equations of a first order condition, market-share (demand), and supply equations. The novelty of the model is in its ability to extract information on both the magnitude and significance of switching costs, as well as on customers' transition probabilities, from conventionally available highly aggregated data which do not contain customer-specific information. As a matter of illustration, the model is applied to a panel data of banks, to assess the switching costs in the market for bank loans. The point estimate of the average switching cost is 4.1% which is about one third of the market average interest rate on loans. More than a quarter of the customer's added value is attributed to the lock-in phenomenon generated by these switching costs. About a third of the average bank's market share is due to its established bank-borrower relationship.

Communication and Ethnic Community: The Case of Landsmanshaftn

This study explores aspects of the role of communication in the socialization experiences of immigrant minorities by examining the mass communication, organizational, and interpersonal activities of contemporary American landsmanshaftn. These Jewish voluntary associations, formed by immigrants who typically share common origins in an East European hometown, exhibit changing organizational priorities and evolving expressions of ethnic community affiliation from their founding to today. In looking for and examining the relationships between ethnicity and communication, this study focuses on the changing orientation of a variety of landsmanshaftn to their city or town of origin, to the United States, and to the State of Israel. Interviews were conducted with leaders of sixty-eight American and Israeli organizations from six European locations: Antopol, Bialystok, Czestochowa, Lodz, Minsk (White Russia), Warsaw. These data are supplemented by an examination of reports about landsmanshaftn activities in the Yiddish press, and information from the organizations\u27 own documents and publications. An analysis of the mass media behavior and interpersonal communication networks of the landsmanshaft leadership is also offered. Adaptations in the meaning of landsmanshaft membership evolve from the original hometown-based motive for affiliation. Even during the period of World War II, the landsmanshaftn seem more linked to American rather than European concerns. Organizational agendas are presently delimited by mass communicated messages about appropriate landsmanshaft work, messages which today mainly emphasize fundraising for Israel and the memorializing of the destroyed European hometowns. While the mass media may set the perimeters of associational agendas, landsmanshaft leaders also influence the nature of organizational activity. Leaders\u27 views of their group\u27s purpose reflect, in part, their personal involvement with other types of organizations and causes. In general, the value which members place on the opportunities for interpersonal discussion and fellowship afforded by their organization must be underscored. However, little communication is exhibited between American and Israeli landsmanshaftn deriving from the same hometown. This study of the continuity of landsmanshaftn demonstrates the role that communication plays in sustaining these organizations as adaptive vehicles for the maintenance and modification of ethnic community affiliation