For more than a century, ever since Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times in 1896, his newspaper has proudly.
After crossing swords with James Kilpatrick, intellectual mastermind of the South’s “massive resistance” campaign against public school desegregation, Friedman was caught in the crossfire between the ADL’s New York office and Virginia’s Jewish community, fearful of antisemitic backlash. He fell on his sword, resigning and moving to Philadelphia to head the American Jewish Committee’s regional office.
For more than 40 years, he distinguished himself as a community activist and historian of Philadelphia’s Jewish community, and of the national Black-Jewish civil rights coalition, whose “collapse” he chronicled in a still-impressive 1995 book.