J.B. Salsberg was a labour organizer, a political activist, a Communist and a Jew. Salsberg was the Communist member of the Ontario Legislature for the St. Andrew riding for 12 years, from 1943 until he lost the seat in 1951, as Canada’s Cold War took hold. Born in Lagow, Poland, in 1902, he came to Canada with his mother and brothers when he was 11. His father had arrived earlier, eking out a living as junkman with a horse and wagon. At 14, J.B. left school to work – first in leather goods, and then in caps and millinery. By the early 1920s, he was involved in the union’s battle against the exploitative conditions of home work in the industry. His parents were orthodox and had hopes of a rabbinical career for their son, Yossel [Joe], but he like many of his generation was soon attracted to secular learning. When he was 16, Salsberg became a left socialist Zionist. A few years later he, along with a number of his contemporaries such as Itche Goldberg, who later became his brother-in-law, and Philip Halperin, the first editor of Der Kamf, became Communists. They were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 which promised an end to class exploitation and antisemitism.

Except for four years, when he was expelled, from 1928–32, for opposing the party’s Bolshevization policy, Salsberg was a member of the Communist Party and in the leadership as a member of the central committee. He left the Communist Party in 1958. His lifelong commitment was to Yiddishkayt and the labour and political activism which for him flowed from his identity as a Jew and an internationalist. Elected to the Ontario legislature in 1943, J.B. had a distinguished career as a respected Member of Parliament supporting anti-discrimination and fair employment legislation, labour rights and a wide range of issues from health care to day nurseries for working mothers to the elimination of “illegitimate” on any child’s birth certificate.

I have great respect for Gerald Tulchinksy’s work as a historian. In his two-volume book Branching Out he provided the most comprehensive and inclusive account of Jewish history in Canada. His work is highly regarded by a broad political spectrum of the Jewish community, no easy feat these days. Nevertheless, I was wondering why it is now kosher to greet a biography of Joe Salsberg, subtitled “A Life of Commitment,” with applause. Is it because Salsberg is now safely dead, and became an ex-communist who in his last years embraced Israel and Zionism and denounced the Soviet Union? Fred Rose, the Communist MP in Québec, who also spoke for social justice and introduced the first anti-discrimination legislation, as well as advocated for health care in the House of Commons, is remembered in a biography with the title Stalin’s Man in Canada, in my mind an inaccurate and insulting dismissal of the man and what he stood for. Luckily in Winnipeg, Joe Zuken, the communist alderman of Winnipeg, is honoured with a biography by Doug Smith, Joe Zuken, Citizen and Socialist, and Jacob Penner’s son Roland provides an affectionate picture of his Communist father in his A Glowing Dream: A Memoir.

I think Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment is an important book. It’s not perfect; it would have been nice to hear more about Salsberg’s life as a union organizer. And I take issue with Tulchinsky’s argument in the last chapter of the book. I don’t really accept that it is accurate to view Salsberg’s return to labour Zionism and his activism in the mainstream Jewish community as “coming home,” and that in his post-Communist activism “Salsberg became what he truly was… a public Jewish conscience, a secular rabbi pursuing causes that would elevate the minds and spirits and spirits of Toronto.” I appreciate Tulchinsky’s depiction of J.B. as a generous, humane “mensch,” very rooted in the community whose life was motivated by devotion to an ideal. Salsberg was never anybody’s pawn. The over three decades he spent as a Communist were not an unfortunate misguided side path until he found his way back to the mainstream fold. He, of all people, had an opportunity not afforded to many in Canada to learn about Stalin’s crimes but chose to remain silent.

I would argue that Salsberg was not an exception but one of many Communist activists who made wonderful contributions to Canadian life. Joe Zuken expressed this eloquently when he came to the difficult decision to remain in the Communist Party after the 20th Party Congress revelations of 1956:

“[…] Annie Buller and Joe Forkin went up to help organize some workers in Manitoba with my brother [Cecil Ross] who put his freedom on the line and went to Flin Flon and went to jail for it and they are only examples; when people went on the picket line, when people went marching on the May Days, when people went demonstrating for peace, when people went out when Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded; they were fighting for a cause…

“There were some terrible things that were done in the Soviet Union, under the Stalin regime, I said it before and I repeat it: ‘Stalin died too late.’ He did some terrible things with his purges, his cult of personality and so on… You don’t condemn your work or the work of your comrades in causes that were correct because of some very terrible things that were done by Stalin.”

The leadership of the progressive Jewish organizations, and prominent Jewish Communists such as Sam Lipshitz, Manya Lipshitz, Morris Biderman, Joe Gershman, Joe Zuken, Lil Himmelfarb Ilomaki, Annie Buller, and Fred Rose were all activists. They, like J.B. Salsberg, were idealists with deep connections to secular Jewish cultural life. They were wrong in seeing the Soviet Union as the model for a new society.

What they did on Canadian soil – helping the unemployed, organizing unions, pushing for anti-racism, health care – was good stuff.