  We present an implementation of electroweak Z-boson production in association
with two jets at hadron colliders in the POWHEG framework, a method that allows
the interfacing of NLO-QCD calculations with parton-shower Monte Carlo
programs. We focus on the leptonic decays of the weak gauge boson, and take
photonic and non-resonant contributions to the matrix elements fully into
account. We provide results for observables of particular importance for the
suppression of QCD backgrounds to vector-boson fusion processes by means of
central-jet-veto techniques. While parton-shower effects are small for most
observables associated with the two hardest jets, they can be more pronounced
for distributions that are employed in central-jet-veto studies.
