 He was an intimate of leading political and judicial figures and in 1957, enticed Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court to spend a Sabbath at the seminary in the study of the Talmud.Finkelstein served as the official Jewish representative to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's commission on peace, and in 1963 President John F. Kennedy sent him to Rome as part of an American delegation to the installation of Pope Paul VI.He also offered a prayer at the second inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.