Menachem Friedman

Menachem Friedman was born in 1936 in Bnei Brak

Friedman was born in Bnei Brak in 1936 and grew up there. His parents, Rachel and Moshe, were traditional Jews. He attended a Mizrachi school until fifth grade, then moved to the Haredi Rabbi Akiva Talmud Torah after his father became more religious.

He studied at the Yishuv Hehadash yeshiva in Tel Aviv and for about a year at the Hebron Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He then served in the IDF. Later he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was a teaching assistant to Professor Jacob Katz, who supervised his doctorate on the Ashkenazi Old Yishuv.

In 1973 he became a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and was made full professor in 1996. He coined the term "society of learners" for a Haredi way of life in which husbands study Torah full time. He also headed an institute for contemporary Judaism and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Berkeley, Cambridge and other universities.

In 2010 he published a book on the Lubavitcher Rebbe with Samuel Heilman, which Chaim Rapoport criticized. Friedman retired in 2006 and died on 16 March 2020. He was buried in Mazkeret Batya, and his archive was donated to the National Library.