US Senator. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a US Senator from Nebraska from December 1978 until his death. Born to Jewish parents, he received his primary education in local schools and graduated from Omaha Central High School at his hometown in 1945. He then attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota for a year before transferring to Creighton University in Omaha for two years before graduating from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Nebraska in 1949 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and zoology in 1949. He then worked in the wholesale tobacco and candy business while serving in the US Army Reserve. In 1966 he enrolled at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts to pursue his graduate work, and later served as a member of the Nebraska Judicial Qualifications Commission and of the Board of Directors for Omaha Public Power District. In 1973 he was elected Mayor of Omaha, serving until 1977. In 1976 he decided to run for the US Senate after 22-year incumbent Roman Hruska decided not to seek re-election. A lifelong Republican, it became apparent he would not win the Republican nomination and he joined the Democratic Party, winning the Democratic nomination and then the general election, becoming the first Democratic Senator elected from Nebraska since 1934 and the first Jewish person ever to win a statewide election in Nebraska. When Senator Hruska resigned from the US Senate on December 27, 1976 Nebraska Governor J. James Exon subsequently appointed him to the seat he had won the previous month. During his time in the US Senate, he served as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, in which position he advocated for financial and military assistance to the new Sandinista National Liberation Front regime in Nicaragua in 1979. In 1982 he was elected to a 2nd term. He died suddenly from a heart attack at the 1987 Omaha Press Club Ball at the age of 58. Ed Zorinsky Lake, a man-made lake in Douglas County, Nebraska is named in his honor.