The shop sits on a Brooklyn corner in the 1930s. Sawdust on the floor, the smell of blood and brine, a scale on the counter. Beny Chametzky came from Volhynia in 1913, learned the trade, and bought the place. Anna came from Lublin and ran a sewing machine in a sweater factory. They speak Yiddish at the table. The older son, Leslie, ships out with the infantry, lands in North Africa, falls into German hands, and comes home through Sicily. The younger son, Jules Chametzky (1928–2021), watches the meat go out the door and the language stay in the house. He learns young that a people can be cut down and a tongue can go silent, and that somebody has to keep the account.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme that lets a man feel he counts against death. The hero system tells him how to earn cosmic significance, how to leave a mark the grave cannot take back. Religions promise this through the soul. Nations promise it through the flag and the line of descent. Becker’s claim is that the terror of dying drives the whole enterprise, and that men will kill and die to keep their immortality project intact. Chametzky builds his on letters. He builds it on the canon.
To put a writer in an anthology is to confer a small immortality. The editor stands at the gate. He decides whose sentences students read in 2050 and whose go to the landfill. Chametzky spends his life at that gate, and he spends it widening the opening. His essay broadens the canon to take in the regional, the ethnic, the racial, the sexual. He writes the first book-length study of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), the Yiddish editor and novelist of the immigrant Lower East Side, and titles it From the Ghetto. He co-edits Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. He gathers his encounters with the great Jewish writers into Out of Brownsville. In his own account of the early years, the work means letting in Jewish, Black, and women writers, fresh currents against the dam of the New Criticism.
The shape of the work repeats the shape of the wound. A boy from a Yiddish house, his kin in the path of the German erasure, grows up to run the ledger of who survives in print. The anthology is a Yizkor book at scale, the memorial roster a congregation reads for its dead, widened to a national literature. His immortality project answers the death he fears most, the erasure of his own kind.
The word he loves carries other freight in other houses.
In a study hall not far from where Beny kept the shop, a young man in a black hat bends over a folio. For him the canon closed long ago. The text came down at Sinai and the sages built a fence around it. To broaden it is no project, it is a breach. His work is transmission, word for word, the same page his grandfather swayed over. Where Chametzky opens the gate, the yeshiva man guards it shut, and both believe they serve permanence.
Across the river a professor of the old school keeps a list of the hundred books a free man should read. To him Chametzky’s broadening reads as dilution, the slow drowning of Homer and Milton under the minor and the local. The same act Chametzky calls justice the traditionalist calls vandalism. One word, canon. The traditionalist mourns the books pushed off the raft. Chametzky mourns the writers never let aboard.
On the other side of the world a Maori carver works a beam for a meeting house. His ancestors live in the whakapapa, the genealogy chanted aloud, and in the figures cut into wood. He keeps no canon of printed books. To him the written page might be the thief that lets a people forget what it once held in the mouth. Chametzky’s whole apparatus, the press, the anthology, the footnote, looks to the carver like the instrument of forgetting.
In a glass office a founder hears the word canon and reaches for “legacy.” The old code runs slow. The canon is technical debt. Permanence comes through the next release, not the preserved text. He builds his immortality on disruption, on the thing that erases what came before. The founder and Chametzky both chase a name that outlasts the body. They disagree on whether the past is the treasure or the obstacle.
January 1954. A witness names Chametzky before the federal board that hunts subversives. The local papers run it. The president of the University of Minnesota convenes a committee. Chametzky sits across from them with his graduate work, his teachers Leo Marx (1919–2022) and Henry Nash Smith (1906–1986), his half-built life as a scholar, and a question on the table about his loyalties.
He had drawn his line already. He joined the American Labor Party, the NAACP, the youth groups. He did not join the Communist Party. Three things kept him out. He rejected its line on the Jewish and Zionist question. He rejected social realism as the measure of a book. And he rejected the Stalinist habit of settling an argument by destroying the man who lost it. Then came the hanging of Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), the Czech Communist, a Jew, strung up by his own party. For Chametzky the rope around Slánský settled it. The Communist immortality project, the workers’ paradise that licensed any corpse, fed on Jews no less than on anyone else, and called it history.
The committee clears him later that year. He keeps his place. He has watched a rival hero system, the state’s loyalty apparatus, decide whether a man is surplus, and he has seen what another one does to its own when it judges them so.
Out of that refusal grows the second word he holds sacred. Solidarity. He is a union man before he is a professor, a member of the electrical workers in his Brooklyn years. At the University of Massachusetts he builds the faculty union and serves as its third president. He pulls the Amherst faculty and the smaller, angrier Boston faculty back into one body and writes the rules for their quarrels. He quotes Lenin (1870–1924) on what a union is, a defensive arm raised to take a blow. Then he adds his own clause. You need the arm so that you do not just barely survive, but live with dignity. Survival alone falls short. A man owes himself a life with a floor under it, and the floor gets built by men standing together.
The word travels badly.
In a monastery the monks keep silence and sing the hours. Their solidarity is the communion of saints, the living and the dead in one choir, each man dying to his own will so the body might pray as one. They stand together by sitting still and saying nothing of themselves. Chametzky’s solidarity speaks up, files the grievance, signs the contract. The monk’s empties the self. Both answer death. One by the contract, one by the Rule.
In the mountains a Pashtun elder reads solidarity as the blood tie and its debts, melmastia and badal, the hospitality a man owes his guest and the revenge he owes his line. The bond runs through kin and honor. A union of strangers who happen to share a payscale might strike him as no bond at all.
To the young officer at the academy solidarity is the man on his left and the man on his right. Unit cohesion. No one left on the field. He will die for the three men in his fire team and could not tell you their politics. Chametzky’s solidarity sets labor against capital. The officer’s sets flesh against fear under fire. Same word, different field, each built to hold a line.
In a hill town a Sicilian widow keeps the older meaning, the one that runs against his. Solidarity is silence. You owe the family your mouth shut. You never speak to the state. Chametzky’s solidarity is the open contract, the named member, the voice raised in the hall. Hers is the sealed lip, the refusal to sit on any record at all. The same word names the thing he does and the thing he most refuses.
His third word puzzles the others as much. Dignity, the floor under the man. The dueling aristocrat hears dignity and reaches for his sword, since for him it climbs, a height defended against insult, not a floor secured by contract. The Stoic hears it and looks inward, to the citadel no master can enter, and finds the floor beside the point, since the wise man keeps his dignity in chains. The Confucian elder hears it as face, the right order of ranks, each man dignified by filling his station. Chametzky alone hears, in dignity, a thing you bargain for and win in a room with a contract on the table.
He dies in Amherst in 2021, married more than fifty years to the writer Anne Halley (1928–2004), his name on the Massachusetts Review he started with a memo in 1958. The shop in Brownsville is gone. The Yiddish at his parents’ table is gone with the world that spoke it. What he built to answer that loss still stands on a shelf, the anthology with its widened roster, the names he would not let the landfill take. He spent his life at a gate deciding who survives in print, the same work, in the end, as the union man deciding who survives with dignity and the boy deciding whom to read into the next century. The hero system he chose let a butcher’s son confer immortality on others while he was still alive to sign the page. Whether the canon he widened holds, or narrows again, or breaks apart, the next century decides. He took his stand at the gate and held it.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undermines the intellectual and political legacy of Jules Chametzky, a pioneer of ethnic studies, a champion of multi-ethnic American literature, and a co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.
Chametzky spent his career arguing that the American literary mainstream is constantly revitalized, integrated, and transformed by the unique voices of marginalized ethnic, racial, and regional writers. Through books like Our Decentralized Literature and his work founding The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky operated on a progressive, pluralistic model: that cultural mediation and literary translation can bridge divisions, allowing minority groups to integrate into a wider democratic culture while retaining their distinct heritage.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Chametzky’s pluralistic optimism in several ways.
Chametzky’s scholarship on Jewish-American and Black writers treats ethnic identity as a site of rich, ongoing cultural mediation—a process where an individual navigates his immigrant or minority heritage and negotiates his place within the broader American fabric. If Mearsheimer is right, this focus on literary mediation misses the primary force shaping human life. Individuals do not fluidly negotiate their identities through essays and novels; their moral frameworks and group allegiances are largely sealed by intense childhood socialization and innate sentiments long before they can think critically. The deep “value infusion” of the initial tribe anchors the individual. What Chametzky analyzes as a smooth, creative synthesis of cultures is a luxury narrative that can only exist when a dominant group or state provides total security.
By co-editing the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature and anthologizing Black writers, Chametzky sought to expand the canon to foster mutual understanding and democratic inclusion. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, implies that these canonical projects do not work as tools for universal harmony. Narratives and cultural products evolve to bind coalitions, signal group loyalty, and manage reputations in a competitive arena. Chametzky’s push to decentralize literature was not a neutral aesthetic correction; it was a highly sophisticated move by an elite intellectual coalition designed to claim moral and institutional authority within the university system. The anthology functions as a badge of tribal alignment for the academic left, rather than a bridge to post-tribal coexistence.
Chametzky’s lifelong political and academic work—including his early activism with the NAACP and his labor union leadership—pre-supposed that disparate social groups could build stable, lasting coalitions based on shared progressive ideals, fair practices, and rational consensus. Mearsheimer’s worldview is tragic and static. Because humans are tribal at their core and driven by survival under conditions of scarcity and anarchy, the thin ties of shared literary appreciation or progressive political rhetoric are the first things to snap during a crisis. When real group interests, resources, or safety are threatened, individuals do not fall back on the multi-ethnic synthesis Chametzky curated in The Massachusetts Review. They abandon the cosmopolitan coalition and retreat to their primary, unreflective group identities for protection.
Chametzky wrote about early Jewish-American writers like Abraham Cahan, analyzing their work as a complex, self-conscious psychological negotiation between the old-world ghetto and new-world American modernity. He viewed assimilation as a fluid, literary, and intellectual journey through which individuals wrestled with competing cultural ideals.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips the romance from this process. Assimilation is not a series of individual literary choices; it is a structural capitulation to a more powerful survival vehicle. When an immigrant group arrives in an anarchic or highly competitive environment, individual survival depends on embedding oneself within the dominant, protective social structure. The shift in language, dress, and values that Chametzky tracks in literature is the standard operation of the human animal adapting to a new dominant tribe. The writer’s prose does not drive this process; it merely documents the surface adjustments after the structural reality of power has already forced the realignment.
A core tenet of Chametzky’s critical work is that ethnic and marginalized literature acts as a corrective, purifying force that holds American democracy accountable to its universalist promises. He believed that by introducing the stories of the marginalized into the mainstream, literature could expand the capacity for empathy and reason within the dominant culture.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals why this humanist hope fails. Reason and text-based empathy rank last among the forces that govern human behavior, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. A dominant coalition does not alter its structural behavior or yield material power because it reads a moving novel about a minority group. The universalist democratic promises Chametzky looks to are not active moral truths; they are the ideological standard of the ruling coalition. The dominant group will tolerate and even celebrate multi-ethnic literature during times of peace and abundance, but it will discard those empathetic insights instantly the moment its own collective dominance or security is threatened.
Through his decades of work with The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky sought to create an independent cultural space where writers, civil rights activists, and labor leaders could unite their voices to drive political reform. He operated on the liberal assumption that a shared commitment to artistic excellence and social justice could bind disparate groups into a durable political force.
Mearsheimer’s realism exposes the fragility of this setup. A literary magazine cannot manufacture a tribe. Real, binding social units are forged through intense childhood socialization, shared ancestry, or the immediate, mutual reliance required to survive in a hostile world. The coalition Chametzky assembled in print was an elite, intellectual arrangement held together by shared language and status goals. Because it lacked the deep, non-rational value infusions that generate true sacrifice and group loyalty, such a coalition possesses no structural staying power when real political or material conflicts emerge between the constituent groups.
If Mearsheimer is right, Chametzky’s decentralized literature captures the surface ripples of ethnic assimilation during a rare period of domestic stability. It mistakes a temporary cultural truce for a permanent transformation of the human animal, who remains stubbornly tribal from start to finish.
If David Pinsof is right, this multi-ethnic literary project rests on a false premise. Chametzky treats cultural friction as a big misunderstanding that can be cured by reading immigrant stories.
Pinsof reveals that ethnic groups do not clash because they lack empathy or do not understand each other. They clash because they compete for zero-sum status, resources, and control over the state. A group understands its rivals well. It demonizes them to win. The intellectual tells a nicer story. He claims that the public needs his curated anthologies to overcome bigotry. This claim turns the literary critic into an indispensable social healer.
By expanding the canon to include Black, Jewish, and immigrant writers, Chametzky did not just discover hidden artistic value. He built a new alliance engine for the secular intelligentsia.
An intellectual gains elite status by deciding who belongs in the canon. Books like From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan allow the professor to serve as a high priest for the marginalized. He translates the immigrant experience into academic capital. He uses this capital to justify his authority over the culture. The study of decentralized literature becomes a way to signal progressive moral superiority over the provincial middle class.
Chametzky also worked as a union leader, heading the faculty union at the University of Massachusetts. In the union hall, he engaged in a direct, zero-sum fight over salaries, contracts, and workplace power. Pinsof would argue that this union work reflects how humans operate. It is a rational struggle for resources.
The contradiction lies in the academic work. The intellectual acts like a savvy primate when fighting the administration for a contract, but he turns around and writes essays claiming that society’s deep wounds are just cognitive errors and narrative omissions.
If Pinsof is right, Chametzky’s career is a monument to the survival strategy of the academic class. The professor creates a market for his own intervention. He insists that reading ethnic literature fixes a broken world. In reality, the world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to function, with rival coalitions fighting for dominance. The professor merely designs a sophisticated lens to examine the hole, ensuring that he receives the credit—and the paycheck—for managing the view.
To fully strip away the misunderstanding myth from Jules Chametzky, you have to look at the specific machinery he used to construct his career. Chametzky did not just analyze text; he built institutions like The Massachusetts Review and traveled Europe as a Fulbright professor teaching American Studies.
If Pinsof is right, every one of these high-minded achievements was a tactical maneuver in a zero-sum game of status and power.
Chametzky co-founded The Massachusetts Review in 1959 to create a space where literature, art, and public affairs could converge. The stated mission was to break down institutional barriers, foster deep cultural dialogue, and heal a fragmented society by exposing readers to radical new perspectives.
Pinsof might say that a literary journal is not a bridge; it is a border checkpoint. It is a tool used by a small group of academic elites to decide who is allowed into the intellectual marketplace. Chametzky did not print minority and radical writers to cure public ignorance. He printed them to build a proprietary network of alliances. By acting as the gatekeeper who “discovered” and validated these voices, Chametzky accumulated immense cultural capital. The journal did not heal society’s fragments; it established Chametzky and his peers as the mandatory brokers who get to decide which fragments are considered respectable.
Chametzky spent significant time abroad as a Fulbright professor in countries like Germany, lecturing on American literature and ethnic diversity. The stated goal of the Fulbright program is classic misunderstanding-myth ideology: to promote mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries, reducing international friction through educational exchange.
Pinsof might say that Chametzky’s European lectures were not an exercise in international empathy; they were a highly successful export of class ideology. By teaching foreign elites how to interpret American society through the lens of literary multiculturalism, Chametzky was expanding the market share of his own profession. He was telling European academics: “The old, raw, capitalist America is crude, but we—the literary intellectuals—possess the sophisticated tools to understand and fix it.” It was an international alliance-building project designed to validate the moral superiority of the university class over the bourgeois business class, both at home and abroad.
When Chametzky worked to integrate Jewish-American, Black, and immigrant writers into the standard curriculum, it was framed as a noble correction of a historical error. The narrative claimed that the old WASP-dominated canon was a product of narrow-minded bias, and that a wider canon would create a more democratic, empathetic student body.
Pinsof might say that the old canon was not a mistake, and the new canon was not a cure. The old canon was a tool used by an older elite to maintain its status. Chametzky and his generation of progressive, multi-ethnic intellectuals did not dismantle the idea of a dominant hierarchy; they launched a hostile takeover of it. By inventing a new set of literary requirements based on identity and marginalization, they rendered the old guard’s expertise obsolete. You cannot teach the new canon without Chametzky’s anthologies and frameworks. The “inclusive canon” was a highly effective lever used to displace an entrenched academic rival and secure jobs, prestige, and institutional control for a new coalition of professors.
