Professional Background
Dror Birger is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Cornell University and holds both a master's and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Mr. Birger served as an instructor of record at both universities, teaching courses that span Greek philosophy, German idealism, existentialism, science fiction, and critical theory. He is also a graduate of Tel Aviv University’s Lautman Program and a visiting doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-European Research Council (HUJI–ERC) “Christosemitism” seminar.
Mr. Birger’s doctoral project, “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. Situating Esther within the context of the Shoah,and building on the expansive existing scholarship that explores Nazi and Jewish engagements with the Megillah, his project studies how the Scroll turned into a repository of political imagination and, in fact, a site for negotiating political meaning during and after the Holocaust.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Sosland Foundation Fellow, Dror Birger will explore how Jews and non-Jews imagined Jewish diaspora politics and the Jewish struggle for survival by conducting research on a wide array of responses to Esther, including plays, parodies, folklore adaptations, diaries, films, images, and survivors’ accounts from before and after the war. Mr. Birger plans to utilize the Museum’s expansive collections to study, in particular, the tension between Nazi and Jewish adaptations of Esther, while demonstrating how both operate within a dialogical rhetorical framework, attempting to deconstruct or counter the other’s engagement with the biblical text.
Residency Period: September 1, 2026 – April 30, 2027