Sara Lipton

Sara Lipton is a medieval historian; she is Professor of History at Stony Brook University, where she has been appointed as Department Chair for 2023-26. She has been elected to serve as the 100th President of the Medieval Academy of America (2024-25).

Lipton is noted for her work on the medieval origins of the iconography of antisemitism. According to Howard Jacobson, Lipton argues that the medieval artistic convention of depicting Jews with a Roman nose, dark skin, and scraggly or pointy beard originated in the 1200s, and were commissioned by Christian authorities as works of art depicting the sinfulness of greed in order to set the pious on a righteous (non-greedy) path to heaven. Jacobson notes that even if the Church's motivation was to discourage sin rather than to promote Jew-hatred, it was "a hard distinction to maintain."

Lipton's 1999 book, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Book Prize for Best First Book from the Medieval Academy of America. Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography, won the 2015 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Cultural Studies and Media Studies from the Association for Jewish Studies.

Dark Mirror
Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (2014) traces the development of antisemitic imagery from the 1000s through the 1400s.