Career
She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College, a Bachelor of Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a master"s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts. She edited The First Mississippi Reader (1973) and Free to Be.
You and Maine (1974).
Some of her books include Too Young to Die—Youth and Suicide (1976), Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce (1985), and Jewish Days: A Book of Jewish Life and Culture Around the Year (1996). There was a special commission appointed by the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America to study the issue of ordaining women as rabbis, which met between 1977 and 1978, and consisted of 11 men and three women. The women were Francine Klagsbrun, Marian Siner Gordon, an attorney, and Rivkah Harris, an Assyriologist.
After years of discussion, the JTS faculty voted to ordain women as rabbis and as cantors in 1983.
In 1988, at the First International Jewish Feminist Conference in Jerusalem, a group of women organized a prayer service at the Western Wall and selected Klagsbrun to carry the Torah at the head of the group, making her the first woman to carry a Torah to the Western Wall. In 1989 she helped dedicate a Torah to the Women of the Wall.
