Canada’s new Conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, surprised supporters and opponents alike when he named 46-year-old Stephen Lewis, a life-long Socialist active in the Jewish Community to be Canada’s next Ambassador to the United Nations.
Lewis is the former leader of the New Democratic Party in Ontario which his late father had also headed. His grandfather was a member of the Bundists, the Jewish Socialist movement in Czarist Russia. Lewis is also a former chairman of the Histadrut campaign in Ontario and has lectured on the Holocaust in literature.
Although on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Mulroney, Lewis said after accepting the oppointment that there were “clearly areas where I could make a contribution without ideological hangups.”
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