This photo of the late literary scholar and editor Jules Chametzky was taken around 1970 by the late photographer and Hampshire College professor Jerome Liebling, a good friend. 
This photo of the late literary scholar and editor Jules Chametzky was taken around 1970 by the late photographer and Hampshire College professor Jerome Liebling, a good friend.  Credit: Photo COURTESY OF RACHEL LIEBLING

AMHERST — Friends, families, colleagues and others will gather at the University of Massachusetts on Friday to honor the late English professor Jules Chametzky, a key figure in broadening the university’s progressive values in the 1960s and 1970s.

The free symposium, to be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Old Chapel, will also include presentations by a number of writers and artists in recognition of Chametzky’s work as the founding editor of The Massachusetts Review, the Five College literary journal. Chametzky, who came to UMass in the late 1950s, died in Amherst in September 2021 at age 93.

He retired from the university in the early 1990s but continued to teach and advise graduate students for some years afterward, while also serving as an editor emeritus at The Massachusetts Review.

At the time of his death, friends and colleagues remembered Chametzky as an early advocate for an Afro-American Studies Department on campus. He also made The Massachusetts Review a forum for less-represented voices — Black, women, Jewish and others — and international writers.

The writer and former UMass professor Ekwueme Michael Thelwell told the Gazette last year that Chametzky was “a part of that central constituency” that had made UMass a forum for diverse voices, scholars, musicians and others in the 1970s.

Aside from his teaching and scholarship — he specialized in American Jewish and ethnic literatures — Chametzky also helped UMass professors unionize, and he served as the union’s third president in the late 1970s.

At Friday’s symposium, titled “The Legacy of Jules Chametzky,” the morning sessions will be given over to personal recollections from friends and family. In the afternoon, writers and scholars such as Doug Anderson, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Robin McLean will speak.

The event is sponsored by numerous UMass departments and offices, and by Amherst and Smith colleges and The Massachusetts Review. Attendees are “strongly encouraged” to wear a KN-95 mask or equivalent. Extra masks will be available at the door.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.