Jules Chametzky

His parents were immigrants who came to New York State from Eastern Europe, his father Beny from the Volhynia (now Ukraine) in 1913, and his mother Anna from Lublin, Poland.

[8] He received his Ph.D. in 1958, and, with the support of Leo Marx, began teaching the following year in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was tenured in 1961, at the age of thirty-three.

The subject of Chametzky's Ph.D. dissertation—the plays of John Marston—reflected both his early interest in theater and the then dominant tastes of the New Criticism; his most influential writings on literature would respond instead to the themes of regionalism and ethnicity in other authors, such as Faulkner and Bellow, first read during his graduate school years.

[12] A series of short, personalized portraits of noted literary figures—a number of which had previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review or on the "Jewish Currents" website—has recently been published as Out of Brownsville.

[15] In a chapter from Enlarging America, the Harvard literary scholar Susanne Klingentein offers a description by Chametzky of the publication's editorial goals during its formative years: “We wanted to break the logjam of ideas represented by the New Criticism and formalism,” he commented; publishing so-called "marginal" voices (e.g., Jewish, black, and women writers) was one way of "letting in fresh political and ideological currents.

The other signatories to the original NEH grant request letter were editors of other prominent reviews: Robie Macauley, William Phillips, George Plimpton, and Reed Whittemore.

[19] Differing with their position on the national (i.e., Jewish/Zionist) question, disagreeing that social realism was the best way to judge or write literature, and opposing Stalinist methods of dealing with political opposition, Chametzky refused to join the American Communist Party.

The case received extensive coverage in the local papers, and Chametzky was called to testify before a special Investigating Committee headed by the University of Minnesota President.

[22] Chametzky was a union man from an early age, and a member of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) during his Brooklyn years.

[24] A key accomplishment of his tenure at that post was reconciling the union on the Amherst campus with its members (fewer, though more radicalized) from the University's Boston campus—and developing operating procedures for resolving disputes between them.