His intellectual career - spanning fifty years of study, teaching, writing, translating, traveling, mentoring, and co-founding the Institute for Dialogical Psychotherapy - has prompted a language of genuine dialogue.
His mother, Fannie, a Rabbi’s daughter, was a social activist and voracious reader who loved ideas and profoundly influenced her son.
One of Friedman's main contributions has been to articulate how dimensions (religious, literary, existentialist, sociological, and psychological) of Buber’s thought have reshaped the Human Sciences.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, Friedman’s English translations of Buber’s essays from the original German made them available in the United States for the first time.
Two of Friedman’s main contributions to comparative religious and philosophical studies are inevitably linked by dialogue – the "human image" and "touchstones of reality."
The “human image” is described as an underlying dialogical attitude that calls us into being by pointing us towards meaningful choices between conflicting acts of values and as an ever-recurring unique response of our whole person to particular demand placed upon us.
He has also taught at the University of Chicago, Washington Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion – Cincinnati, Pendle Hill (the Quaker Study Center at Wallingford, Pa.), Union Theological Seminary (New York City), the Washington (D.C.) School of Psychoanalysis, the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology (New York City), Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, Vassar College, the California School of Professional Psychology, San Diego, the University of Hawaii, International College, Los Angeles, William Lyon University and American Commonwealth University, San Diego.
In 1985 Professor Friedman received the Jewish National Book Award for biography for his Martin Buber’s Life and Work.