“I want to be challenged” — Dror Kessler about a new chapter in his life
By: Vanessa Fillis
Tags: Journalism, Songwriting, Data Journalism, Career Journey

“It is a good time to move aside, take a year or two or three even, let the world settle down and when it emerges out of this crisis, you are different, too.”

All his life, Dror has been a very creative and musical person

Over the past 57 years of his life, Yacob Dror Kessler, known as Dror, has been through various circles of studying.

This year, while the world is in chaos, Dror decided that it was a good time for learning something new again. With a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science, he has been working with data for many years. “But I am a little bit tired of doing just algorithms and computer science. I want to be a journalist as well”, Dror explains. The MA in Data Journalism at the Birmingham City University is an opportunity for him to not only bring in his skills and experience in handling data, but also to ask more critical questions. It is important to him that the public knows what data is collected and how it is being used.

As he has been working in data privacy in Israel for many years, this is also where his area of special interest lies. “I’ve been around a lot of data that has been secured for many reasons. Maybe for commercial reasons, maybe for government reasons. It has always fascinated me that the reason they secure it is not for it not to get lost, but for it not to get known. That’s the question: What is the reason for it not being known?”

All his life, Dror has been a very creative person: playing instruments and — since his twenties — also writing songs. This came as a new platform of expression for him, he says: “I found out that writing a song is the most efficient way of expressing an idea because a song usually is very concise and short. You have complete artistic freedom.”

At the same time, songwriting is a form of self-therapy for him. Whatever subject he thinks about, he writes about it — world events as well as very personal events. Constantly putting himself and his thoughts out there, on his website, does not scare him. “I am 57 years old, I am a grandfather, I know who I am, I had a nice life and I will have a nice life going forward. Maybe if I was in my twenties, I would look at it differently. But right now, I feel this is me and if somebody wants to approach this thing called Dror, that’s his choice.”

With a smile, Dror gives a hint that he will probably write a song about his experience, maybe even about some of his classmates.

Besides writing countless songs and working in data privacy, he has also published a book called “Intifada Solitaire” and launched a app “SpellMaze”, a spelling game which he is currently relaunching, an idea he had at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

The current situation and travel restrictions — coming from Israel to the UK he needed to self-isolate — are also why he spent the past two weeks in his house in Wirksworth. Normally a holiday cottage, now his permanent home for the next year at least. When asked how he spent the time, he gets up and holds a paper with Japanese characters into the camera. “An hour or two a day I practice my Japanese, either handwriting or studying new words”, he explains. Besides he tried to relax before his next big adventure.

Dror while cycling from England to Croatia

Getting away from the computer, the data, is just as important to him. Whenever possible, Dror, definetely an outdoor person, likes to take long trips, either by walking or cycling. One trip stood out to him in particular, he says: “Two years ago, I cycled through Europe, from England to Croatia, just myself, my bike and a tent. I spent two months cycling, just going east all the time.”

“I want to be challenged”, is also his goal for the upcoming weeks and months. “To be challenged is to go beyond my area of comfort, beyond the things that I know. And this can be on a personal level or on a subject matter level. I want to feel that I am extending myself. The movements that I’ve been doing were certain movements, but now I am doing different movements.”

To develop more of a critical point of view is one of the outcomes he hopes to achieve. He describes himself more as an accepting than a challenging person, even though he is critical sometimes in his songs or when he talks. “I want to learn to be critical in writing, in investigating, in research.“