(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Ned Gray) Just a couple of days after I arrived to Amherst, Jules Chametzky called to invite me for lunch. My wife and oldest son (the youngest was born three years later) were still in New York. The following day, we met at a local restaurant. Right away, . . .
Read More(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Jerome Liebling, courtesy of Rachel Liebling) in honor of garlic clovesbaked wholein rosemary olive oil that eating together could bean artwhich Americans have perfected that auld lang syne could come in versions unexpected that canons are what you make of them that living in generations brings gracefulness to . . .
Read More(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Jerome Liebling, courtesy of Rachel Liebling) By the second half of the twentieth century, apartheid was so deeply embedded in the national culture that the divide between black and white, codified in law, was fully embraced by institutions from pulpit to prison—and nowhere more so than in colleges . . .
Read More(A Chametzky family photograph, Brooklyn, NY, 1942. Jules Chametzky, fourteen years old, is standing in the back row, second from the right, next to his father and behind his mother.) From “Broadening the Canon, or Talmudic Faulknerism: Reading Chametzky, Knowing Jules” (MR 44 1/2, 2003). When we met in Berlin he adopted . . .
Read More(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Jerome Liebling, courtesy of Rachel Liebling) Jules and I were colleagues before we were friends. We met in 1973 when we joined about a dozen faculty, aggrieved by budget cuts and administrative incompetence more broadly, on an organizing committee aiming to unionize faculty and librarians on the UMass . . .
Read MoreJules was my rabbi, and I think he was the rabbi for many of those who came to his service at Wildwood Cemetery on September 27. He was our rabbi in the spiritual sense, in the police procedural, and in the parental sense. He looked after us. He counseled us. He shared . . .
Read MoreOn Thursday, September 23, the founding editor of the Massachusetts Review, Jules Chametzky, died in Amherst, at the age of ninety-three. To commemorate his passing, and to offer his friends an opportunity for reflection and remembrance, we offer here a small gathering of memories, collected from a few of his friends. I . . .
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