[2] Kipnis was born in Ushomyr in Volhynian Governorate which was part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now in Korosten Raion of Zhytomyr Oblast, Ukraine), into a family of 12.

Kipnis completed his education in Jitomir and Warsaw, then went back to his hometown, where he founded an "improved Cheder," established a Hebrew library and wrote and directed plays.

[3] With the outbreak of World War I, Kipnis established the "Little Library for Children" publisher in Jaffa, while concurrently doing agricultural forced labor for the Ottoman military.

The archive of his work is at the Levin Kipnis Center for Children's Literature, Levinsky Teachers' College.

The center awards a bi-annual prize named after Kipnis for a research project about children's literature.

[5] In 2020 a poem, written by Kipnis as a boy in 1905, was found in the Boris Schatz Archives at the Information Center for Israeli Art.