Lee Max Friedman (December 29, 1871 – August 7, 1957) was a Jewish-American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts.
[2] Friedman left Memphis with his family in 1875 during a yellow fever epidemic and settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where his father became the largest boot and shoe wholesaler in the country and a partner of the chrome leather tannery Bernard & Friedman in Danvers.
He then went to Harvard College, where he was influenced by Professor Charles Eliot Norton and his roommate and lifelong friend was minister and American Unitarian Association president Louis Cornish.
[4] By 1905, Friedman was president of the Boston branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, treasurer of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, secretary of the Purim Association, and trustee of the Children's Institutions, City of Boston.
[5] He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts's 10th congressional district in 1906.
By 1910, he was an organizer and director of the Massachusetts Bonding and Insurance Company and the Rockland Trust Company, a director of People's National Bank, receiver of large Boston corporations, and counsel to the Boston Republic City Committee, the American Woolen Company, and the bondholders in the Bay State gas litigation.
He served as a government appeal agent for the Boston local board during World War I.
He contributed a number of articles and notes for the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society on a wide range of subjects and published a number of volumes on Jewish history.
He was also a trustee and president of the Boston Public Library, a Visiting Committee member of the Boston Art Museum Print Department and the Harvard Library, and a trustee of the General Theological Seminary.