DDS Profile: Sonia Friedman, MD

Excerpt

I was born in Santa Barbara, California, and grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where I attended public high school. My father, Max Friedman, is a chemical engineer and was always enthusiastic about teaching me science. My mother, Ellen Friedman, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and has taught Holocaust studies and women’s studies at the College of New Jersey for the past 40 years. Her book entitled “The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story” [1] is the story of our family. My mother pushed me to excel academically in high school. She saw that as a way to compensate for not being able to give me the advantages that an American-born parent could provide. My grandparents struggled for financial solvency and to assimilate after immigration to the USA. Also, my mother was a feminist and understood the importance of a woman being financially independent. She arrived in the USA at the age of 5, with parents who still spoke broken English at the time of their deaths, received a Ph.D. from New York University, and became a prominent professor and scholar. Of course, her first-born daughter could do even better! She had dreams of my becoming a neurosurgeon, as well as a concert violinist. I travelled to New York City every week to take violin lessons with Lewis Kaplan, a Julliard instructor, and was a concertmaster of my regional youth symphony. Although I had received most of my college acceptances, I had yet to hear from Stanford University, where I wanted to go, so I waited for the postman day after day. My mother was also tired of waiting and convinced my father to call Stanford to ask for the decision. I was probably the only applicant who received her acceptance by phone and not mail. It was 1984, years before the Internet. …