From Esterke to Utena: Sonic Allegory, Diasporic Mourning, and Feminist Protest in theTranscultural Journey of Dana Dana, Talk by Savannah Rivka Powell at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026.

This paper traces the transcultural afterlives of Dana Dana composed by Aaron Zeitlin and Sholom Secunda for Yiddish theatre as a feminist and diasporic allegory that continues to reverberate across global screen culture. Composed in 1940 and later integrated into Zeitlin’s theatre production Esterke (1941), the song’s haunting metaphor of a calf led to slaughter mirrors the constrained agency of Jewish women portrayed as redemptive figures through sacrifice and coerced intimacy. Drawing on feminist reinterpretations of the Esther narrative, theories of sonic affect, and Jewish musicology, I examine how Dana Dana encodes female subjectivity, mourning, and collective trauma through
melodic contour, stage performance, and representation on screen in non-Jewish contexts. Following Joan Baez’s Donna Donna, which transformed the song into a civil rights anthem, Dana Dana migrated across linguistic, political, and spiritual borders. Its Japanese adaptation by Yasui Kazumi reframed it within Buddhist-inflected reflections on impermanence (mujō 無常), while later inclusions in the anime adaptations of Revolutionary Girl Utena and Ghost in the Shell
recontextualize it as critique of patriarchy, martyrdom, and posthuman embodiment. Through close audiovisual analysis and transcultural sound studies, I argue that Dana Dana’s journey constitutes acts of sonic remembrance, feminist protest, and diasporic resilience. By tracing how this Yiddish lament is revoiced through global media, I demonstrate how Jewish musical heritage continues to shape visual and auditory imaginaries of suffering, resistance, and transcendence
within contemporary screen culture.

Savannah-Rivka Powell is a PhD student at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and a Visiting Researcher at Hokkaido University, Japan. Drawing on ethnology, folkloristics, and cultural musicology, her research examines how sound and music function as a point of rendezvous for resilience, memory, and cultural agency within minoritized and diasporic communities. Building on this theoretical framing, she is developing an arts-based methodological approach that treats musical practice as both an analytic lens and a collaborative research method, advancing a proof-of-concept model for community-
engaged scholarship. Her recent work focuses on Jewish and Ainu contexts, exploring how adaptive interpretations of tradition sustain identity across shifting sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. She has conducted collaborative fieldwork in Japan, Estonia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and the United States with minoritized, Indigenous, and diasporic communities. Savannah-Rivka is a graduate of the Japan
Foundation’s Japanese-Language Program for Specialists in Cultural and Academic Fields and an alumna of the Europaeum Scholars Programme at the University of Oxford. She has contributed
to projects supported by the Estonian Research Council and is an active member of the Nordic-Baltic Heritage UNESCO Network. She has been appointed to teach at Wakayama University, Japan, continuing her engagement with transnational heritage and community-based research.