Danny Ben-Moshe, a Melbourne-based documentary filmmaker, received a newspaper clipping from his Indian research assistant in 2006. It was an obituary for a famous Indian actress who had made her career playing the vamp in Bollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s, which was spotted by the girl’s father, who knew Ben-Moshe was Jewish. Ben-Moshe was taken aback when he learned that the woman known as Nadira was born Florence Ezekiel in Israel and was Jewish.
In a recent interview with Quartz, he said, “I’d always heard there were Indian Jews, but I had no idea there was an Indian Jewish superstar.”
Ben-Moshe had never seen a Bollywood film before, but he felt the lesser-known story of an Indian Jewish superstar would be intriguing. As a result, he traveled to India to conduct research. He would learn about some other forgotten Jewish stars over the next ten years, from Pramila to Rose Ezra to the pioneer who blazed a route for them all: Sulochana, a.k.a. Ruby Myers.
