Friedman himself was an interdisciplinary and interreligious
philosopher of dialogue. His intellectual career, spanning fifty years of
study, teaching, writing, translating, traveling, mentoring, and co-founding
the Institute for Dialogical Psychotherapy, is claimed to have prompted a
language of genuine dialogue.
In 1956, Friedman wrote a broad survey of Martin Buber’s
work available at that time, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, which
was the first introduction of Buber’s concepts in the English-speaking world.
He became friends with Elie Wiesel, the celebrated Jewish author, and Abraham
Joshua Heschel, a well-known Jewish religious philosopher.
In this book the author describes Heschel and Wiesel
"as witnesses in our day for the God of the biblical covenant that Moses
proclaimed". He adds that "they are also my witnesses, since I have
stood in a unique personal relationship with them both".
