When you walk into Lin Cohen’s apartment in Ashkelon, it takes a second to understand what you are seeing. Shelves stacked with Marvel Lego sets, rows of Funko Pop figures, a small army of rubber ducks, Minecraft characters peeking from the background. Everything is curated, positioned, loved. Nothing here is random.
Cohen introduces herself in one clean sentence: “I’m Lin Cohen, 25, from Ashkelon, and I collect everything I love.” Behind the toys stands one of the most interesting cultural figures in Israel’s growing geek and collecting scene.
Cohen is a religious, married woman with a baby. On paper, she is supposed to be busy with “serious” things. In reality, she is building Lego, sculpting custom Funko Pops, running pop culture fairs that draw thousands and gaming late at night on her PC or Nintendo.
When people ask why a young religious mother is “wasting time” on Pops and Lego instead of focusing on adult life, she smiles and answers: “This is more serious than you think. What am I, not serious?” For her, these collections are not a retreat from adulthood. They are how she chooses to live it.
Her financial life is disciplined. She does not romanticize debt. She has sold rare Ninja Turtles Pops to fund real-world needs. If someone offered to buy her entire collection at double its market value, she says she would refuse. Every item is tied to a memory: a Lego set her husband brought from Rome, a card drawn at an event that gave her the Iron Man she loves, penguins from a long trip to the United States. “Every piece here comes with emotion, every piece has a story,” she says. “Why would I want to trade that for a number in a bank account?”
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Lin Cohen, 25, a collector and custom toy artist, poses in a Marvel shirt. She is a rising figure in Israel’s geek and collecting scene
(Photo: Bar Gindy)
Cohen began as a Funko Pop collector, then took it one step further. She learned how to customize figures, turning them into physical tributes. Today she runs workshops teaching others to create Pops of their own, four-and-a-half-hour sessions that mix sculpting, painting and storytelling.
Some of her most moving work came during the war. Between ambulance shifts as a combat medic in the reserves, she spent her one night off creating a Pop of Channel 12 news anchor Danny Kushmaro. In two hours, what usually takes her eight, she sculpted, printed and boxed the figure, then chased him down at Barzilai Medical Center to hand it over in person. The TikTok about that night reached hundreds of thousands of views, but the numbers are secondary. For Cohen, it was a way to turn chaos into gratitude.
From there, the circle widened. What began as promoting other people’s fairs turned into producing her own. She now runs recurring pop culture and collecting events that attract huge crowds. Her Hanukkah fair featured a 10-foot “menorah of Pops” built from roughly 400 figures that children dismantled at the end, each running home with five new pieces of someone else’s story.
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Shelves of LEGO sets, Funko Pops and collectibles line Lin Cohen’s apartment
(Photo: Bar Gindy)
Cohen represents exactly what the world of collecting is about: someone who took a niche obsession and turned it into a physical meeting point for thousands of people who once thought they were alone.
After weeks of reserve duty, sirens, ambulances and airlifts, Cohen came home and felt something inside was broken. Sleep did not help, news certainly did not. So she reached for Lego.
She can sit eight hours straight over an intricate set, brick after brick, following instructions, letting her hands and eyes work while her mind finally rests. “It is like watching a series,” she explains, “only with your fingers. You disconnect on purpose. You build, you breathe and for a few hours nothing exists except the next step in the booklet.”
She is not naïve about the psychological language around it. She calls it exactly what it is: “For adults, Lego is therapy and a pause from life. For kids, it is play. For us, it is both.”
A woman in a world that still tests her
Cohen is unafraid to talk about gender. She believes there are far more female geeks and collectors than people think; they are just less visible.
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Lin Cohen and People and Collectors podcast host Bar Gindy pose with a Groot figure in Cohen’s pop culture-filled apartment in Ashkelon
(Photo: Lin Cohen)
“In this world, women always feel they need to prove themselves,” she says. “A guy can wear a Nirvana shirt without knowing one song. A woman can't put on a Metallica shirt until she knows the whole discography. Women go deep because they know they will be tested.”
“Collectors are not children who refused to grow up,” she says. “Collectors are people with a hobby. We like what we like. That is all.”
If there is one line Cohen wants the world to hear, it is this: “Only collect what you love.”
Do not chase the most expensive Pop. Do not treat toys like a stock portfolio. Use coupon codes. Wait for a trip to Eilat before buying that huge Lego set. Join Facebook groups, find your people, negotiate, trade. Go slow. A single shelf can be the beginning of a world.
And if someone online laughs that you are “wasting money on plastic,” Cohen has a simple answer: “Everyone has their thing. Some people buy designer bags. I build universes.”
- For more stories from Lin and other collectors, check out the People and Collectors podcast. The full interview is available with English subtitles and 50 other languages.