Joe Zuken, Citizen and Socialist

A long-time Winnipeg communist city councillor and school trustee, Joe Zuken was loved and hated in about equal measure. He was ignored by no one.

The son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, Zuken received his political education in the hard school of the Great Depression. His subsequent career as a lawyer and municipal politician highlights the forces that dominated Winnipeg's social and political life from the 1930s to the 1980s: the impact of European migration, the growth of radicalism, the internment of communists in World War Two, the political witchunting of the Cold War.

Joe Zuken: Citizen and Socialist examines these issues through the life of a man who, through good times and bad, remained passionately devoted to social justice.