Steven Friedman (born 1953) is a prominent South African political scientist, academic, and political commentator. He serves as a Research Professor and former Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University. Early in his career, he worked as a senior researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) and as a labor journalist, documenting the rise of the black trade union movement during the apartheid era in his 1987 book, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970–1984.
Friedman’s political commentary and academic work focus on democratic theory, civil society, social policy, and racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. A regular columnist for publications such as Business Day and Mail & Guardian, he has written extensively on governance and party politics.
As a South African Jewish scholar, Friedman is a vocal critic of Zionism and Israeli state policy, drawing explicit parallels between South African apartheid and the military administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and critiques the mainstream South African Jewish leadership for aligning with Israeli foreign policy.
In his 2023 book, Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Battle for World Jewish Identity, Friedman examines how contemporary accusations of anti-Semitism are deployed against critics of Israel. Summarizing the thesis of the work, he writes: “A ‘good Jew’ is someone who supports the state of Israel regardless of what it does to Palestinians, while a ‘bad Jew’ is anyone who insists that human rights and justice apply to everyone, including Palestinians.“ He contends that universal human rights and opposition to ethnic nationalism represent the core ethical imperatives of Jewish identity.