Liptzin was born in Sataniv, Russian Empire, and moved to New York at the age of nine.
He graduated from City College of New York and did postgraduate work at the University of Berlin.
His stay in Berlin interested him in the romantic movement in 19th-century German literature.
[2] From 1943 to 1958[3] he served as the chairman of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies.
In 1962, he moved to Israel, where he taught at Tel Aviv University (1962–1963) and the Technion (1962–1966),[3] where he founded the humanities program.