Overview
Dror is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University, a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (D.C.), and a visiting doctoral fellow at the HUJI–ERC “Christosemitism” seminar. He also holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University’s Lautman Program. His research draws on reception studies, biblical studies, Jewish historiography, continental philosophy, German idealism, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School. He has presented his work in various academic contexts, including several AJS conferences, Yale's Renewed Philology working group, the Van Leer Institute’s special Antisemitism convention, the Leo Baeck Institute’s annual German Studies conference, the 56th Annual NeMLA Convention, the American Lacanian Convention ("Lack"), and more.
Dror has several publications, including “Guilt Without a Subject: On the Fate of Guilt in the Age of Narcissism” (These Times, the Van Leer Institute Magazine of Political Thought, Jan. 2022) and two forthcoming peer-reviewed publications: “Court Jews Again: MAGA’s Reading of the Book of Esther” (Theoria Ubikoret, fall 2026) and “Antisemitism as a Form of Epistemic Injustice: The Case of American Jews” (Antisemitism Studies, spring 2027). He is currently working on two new publications ("Yoram Hazony's Esther and the Crisis of MAGA Jews" and an essay studying Nazi engagement with the Megillah) and on a special collected-essays volume entitled "Portable Texts: The Book of Esther in Modern Politics."
His dissertation, “Esther and the Empire,” brings together German studies, Jewish diaspora studies, and biblical studies, and employs literary analysis to bridge different readers of the book of Esther in various historical contexts, illuminating Jewish experience across time and space. This project has evolved out of an urgent call to study the politics of the Jewish diaspora in light of the politicization of antisemitism, as well as ongoing debates surrounding the political role of Jews in North America. The politicization of the crisis of American Jewry culminated in the fall of 2024 with the introduction of “Project Esther,” a Heritage Foundation initiative that mobilizes the biblical story of Persian Jewry in response to what it perceives as the rise of antisemitism in academic institutions. Assuming that the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” reflects a broader tendency, and that we are currently experiencing an “Esther moment,” this project seeks to contextualize and historicize the rhetorical and political use of the Megillah. Instead of retrojecting the contemporary crises of diaspora onto earlier periods, it brings texts and experiences into dialogue so that they may mutually shed light on one another.