“Staring at old photographs all day, I felt like I spent half of my time in New York in the twenty-first century and the other half in Poland in the 1920s.”

Jesse Aaron Cohen shares selections from the YIVO scrapbook. He explains that while he traveled throughout those years as a musician, he kept returning to YIVO, because it was a “weird, wonderful, fascinating little corner of the world” that he considered his own. Similar to Moses reviewing his forty years of leadership in D’varim, we are fortunate to have Jesse share insight into his 10 years as a photo archivist at YIVO.

Jesse Aaron Cohen lives in Brooklyn and works as a photo and film archivist at the YIVO Institute, a Yiddish library and archive in New York City. He is also a contributor to Guilt & Pleasure, and in his spare time he plays keyboard, fake drums and computer in the bands Tanlines, Restless People and Professor Murder.