 Friedman majored in history and philosophy at Brown University.He received an MA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 2002.He taught in the Government department at Dartmouth College in 1998, the Social Studies program at Harvard from 1998 to 2000, and the Political Science department at Barnard College, Columbia University from 2001 to 2006.