Brickner was a longtime political activist who was involved in the civil rights struggle (he was arrested at the Monson Motor Lodge protests in St. Augustine, Florida on June 18, 1964, as part of the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history, having gone there at the urging of Martin Luther King Jr.), the Vietnam antiwar movement (traveling to Paris with an interfaith peace group to meet with Viet Cong leaders) and efforts supporting a woman's right to choose abortion.
Brickner served in the United States Navy during World War II.
In 1952, he received his rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
He was selected by New York magazine as one of its 2003 list of the 50 sexiest New Yorkers, noting that he had "the looks of a rake (wavy silver mane, chiseled jaw) and the soul of a mensch.
[4] On the occasion of the death of Rabbi Balfour Brickner, Dr. Eugene Fisher, Associate Director of the U.S. Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, wrote that he was “one of the great leaders of Reform Judaism and one of the greatest American religious leaders of the second half of the twentieth century.”