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Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories
TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann.
But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to kill the architect of the Holocaust.
That detail is one of many that has spurred Ho Manli, Feng-Shan’s daughter, to speak out against “Night Angels,” the fourth novel by the Chinese-American author Weina Dai Randel. Manli says the book distorts elements of her father’s story, which was unknown before she spent decades documenting his heroic efforts to issue visas allowing Jews to escape to Shanghai.
“What I have found in doing this story is it’s very difficult to try to maintain the historical integrity of the facts,” Manli told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Countless people … want to use this for their own means, whether it be commercial like this novelist, whether it be political, or whatever. So over the two decades that I have been doggedly trying to uncover more and more, I’ve been constantly fending off these sorts of opportunistic assaults.”
The dispute is casting a shadow over the novel, released this month, and reinvigorating longstanding debates over the importance of truth in historical fiction — particularly in stories about the Holocaust.
“Night Angels” follows Feng-Shan and his wife, Grace, as they risk their lives by issuing visas that allow thousands of Jews escape Germany and Austria to Shanghai. Grace, one of the novel’s narrators and main characters, is based on Feng-Shan’s real second wife with the same name who was no longer in Vienna after the Anschluss — Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and the period in which the novel is set. By that time, Feng-Shan had already sent Grace away to Boston. She never witnessed Nazi rule or Feng-Shan’s efforts to save Jews, Manli writes.
Several other events in the book, including Grace’s friendship with a Jewish woman who attempts to assassinate Eichmann and her development of a morphine addiction, are fully fictional.
Manli first took aim at the book in a column last month in China Daily. The novel, she wrote, “exploits real names, real people, real events and places, in what is essentially a Holocaust-themed melodrama.”
“In online reviews, readers say that they are thrilled to learn of my father and this history — except of course, what they have learned is not really history, my father’s, or anyone else’s,” she wrote.
Randel and her publisher, Amazon Publishing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Randel dedicated the novel to “Ho Feng-Shan, his family, and all the angels in Vienna and beyond.” The book includes a disclaimer disclosing that its contents are a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
But that’s not satisfactory to some readers, including Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of the heritage group Historic Shanghai, whose book group read a previous Randel story set in Shanghai.
“If you’re talking about a historical character, you have to get the history right. Otherwise, just create a fictional character,” Kanagaratnam told JTA. “This is written for people who don’t know the history, but as Manli said, that’s dangerous, because then that’s what they remember. That’s what they take away.”
Ho Monto, left, and Ho Manli stand in front of the Righteous Among the Nations wall at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Jan. 23, 2001. (Isaac Harari/AFP via Getty Images)
“Night Angels” has accumulated thousands of positive reviews on Amazon and has been promoted by Jewish organizations across the country. On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council, in collaboration with Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Museum in New York City, will hold an event with Randel and journalist Jonathan Freedland that will explore “fact, fiction, and the sometimes blurred line between them.”
Randel’s book adds to a long list of Holocaust stories occupying that blurry territory, dating from the genre’s early days. Many readers believed, for example, that “The Painted Bird,” the pivotal work of Holocaust fiction from the 1960s, was based on author Jerzy Koszinski’s experience during the Holocaust; it was not. Scholars and booksellers have long agonized over whether to call Elie Wiesel’s “Night” a memoir or a novel, and whether the distinction matters when it is taught in American classrooms.
The fight has extended to questions over who can tell which stories from Holocaust. In 2014, Haaretz journalist Judy Maltz filed a lawsuit against Penguin Canada and author Jenny Witterick alleging that Witterick’s novel, “My Mother’s Secret,” copied Maltz’s documentary film about her family’s rescue during World War II. The court ruled in favor of Witterick on the grounds that copyright protection does not apply to historical events.
“An author is only ever responsible to their own fiction. They have creative license. And fictionalization of other people against their will is part of the history of literature,” said Helen Finch, a professor at the University of Leeds who studies representations of the Holocaust in German literature. “But that doesn’t absolve the writer from criticism.”
Manli — a journalist who has worked for the Boston Globe and helped found the China Daily, a state-backed media outlet, in 1981 — has made it her mission to set the record straight on Feng-Shan’s story. She began researching her father after his death in 1997, while writing his obituary. One line in his memoir from 1990 that recalled “saving who knows how many Jews” piqued her interest and led to a 25-year quest to document the extent of what her father did during the war.
His story of defying both his own government and the government of Germany to write Shanghai visas for thousands of persecuted Jews had been previously unknown, even to the refugees themselves — most of whom never met Feng-Shan.
Manli’s research led to Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial authority, in 2000 as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to those who risked their own lives to help Jews during World War II. Since then, greater attention has been paid to his story, and memorials across the world, from Israel to China to Italy, bear his name today.
Manli said Randel reached out to her several times before her book was published but after it had already been written. According to Manli, Randel sought out her blessing on the book by phone and email, saying that “the Holocaust history and your father’s history is now being forgotten” and adding that she wanted to help spread that history. Manli, who is working on a book of her own about her father, said she refused to answer, “just from the tone of her letter and what she wanted.”
“I have been burned before by this,” Manli told JTA. “I knew immediately that this was not something that I wanted to participate in and certainly that I wasn’t going to endorse.”
In an email shared with JTA in response to Manli’s editorial, Randel wrote that she has “great respect for Dr. Ho Fenghan[sic] and his family. I’m surprised to hear such strong negative criticism. I’m puzzled to see my gesture of respect is viewed in such a hostile way. If Ms. Manli Ho wishes to speak to me, I’m here.”
Randel, according to a biography on her website, came to the United States from China at 24 and became “the first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII.”
Her previous novel, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” follows a Chinese woman who falls in love with a German Jewish refugee living in the Shanghai Ghetto, the restricted area in which over 20,000 displaced Jews lived during World War II, under brutal oversight by Japanese officials who occupied the area. In interviews before the book’s 2021 release, Randel recalled hearing about Jewish refugees while she was living near the district that housed the ghetto.
After moving to the United States, she married an American Jew and is raising her children with both cultures in Boston. She has said “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was inspired by her interest in the history she saw in Shanghai and a desire to pay homage to her Jewish side of the family.
“I think it’s apt to say the survival of Shanghai Jews is also a story of how we as different races and as human beings shine and triumph over war and adversity,” she said in a January 2022 interview with World Literature Today.
But other researchers and authors deeply familiar with Feng-Shan’s story and Jewish history in Shanghai told JTA that “The Last Rose of Shanghai” also contained historical inaccuracies, including misrepresentation of real people who appear as characters, such as Victor Sassoon, a Jewish businessman and member of the dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” and Laura Margolis, the first female Joint Distribution Committee representative.
The book also includes a character named Goya, described as “a shameless Jew … who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.”
The Jewish character is based on the real Kanoh Ghoya, who was not Jewish, but a notoriously cruel Japanese officer who had dubbed himself “king of the Jews” and “was infamous for his inhumane treatment of ghetto inhabitants,” according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was sold to Lake Union Publishing — an imprint of Amazon Publishing — in 2021 as half of a two-book deal worth between $100,000 and $250,000. It was a finalist for a Jewish National Book Award that year. (The Jewish Book Council, which confers those awards, did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the “Night Angels” event.)
Kanagaratnam said Historic Shanghai’s book group read “The Last Rose of Shanghai” in 2021 and hosted Randel for an event. The group was unsatisfied by Randel’s response when factual issues were brought to her attention, particularly the characterization of Ghoya as Jewish, Randel dismissed them, Kanagaratnam said.
Randel’s novel is only part of a growing consciousness among the general public of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story. In recent decades, especially following the normalization of Israel-China relations in 1992 and Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, both governments have promoted the history, sometimes distorting facts to push different narratives about their wartime past.
New books and other media adaptations about the Shanghai Jewish refugee story have proliferated, such as the musical “Shanghai Sonatas” (2022) and the novels “Someday We Will Fly” (2019),“The Lives Before Us” (2019), and “The World and All It Holds” (2023). Other films and books are forthcoming.
“The audience of people who are interested in, if you will, an ‘exotic’ Jewish story, I think has meant that we’re seeing more and more of these. Everyone’s heard the Holocaust story. But now here’s one in an exotic setting,” said Kanagaratnam. “I think authors need to take responsibility. But honestly, I also blame the publishing industry, because where are the fact-checkers? A lot of the stuff in this can be really easily googled.”
Finch said novels that are set during that period are “always a work of fiction about the present.”
“So the question is, why is this author writing this book now? What does that say about the current moment when she’s writing? And what is with Randel trying to reflect either consciously or unconsciously in contemporary politics as well?”
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At US Commission on Civil Rights hearing, Jewish students warn against politicizing campus antisemitism
(JTA) — Instead of practicing with her a capella group or preparing to lead Shabbat services, University of Maryland senior Tekoa Sultan-Reisler spent her Friday afternoon testifying about campus antisemitism in front of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
She shared that she had witnessed antisemitism at her school, and heard about it from other students in J Street U, the college division of the liberal pro-Israel lobby that she leads. But she was also very clear on another point: She did not want Jewish college students’ pain to be used for a political agenda.
“Jewish students do not want to be used as a pretext to justify this divisive and xenophobic action of the administration,” Sultan-Reisler said in her testimony. “Instead, protecting students’ right of free speech and expression would allow all students to feel safe on campus, regardless of faith or ethnicity.”
Sultan-Reisler and other students who testified similarly criticized the Trump administration’s decision to defund universities that did not comply with its terms for addressing antisemitism. They took the stand on Friday on the second day of a two-part hearing called by the civil rights commission in an independent investigation — the first — into how the federal government has responded to campus antisemitism.
The commission, which has the power to issue subpoenas, is appointed by Congress and the president and currently has a narrow Democratic majority. A bipartisan group of representatives requested the antisemitism investigation in 2024.
Friday’s session followed several tense exchanges on Thursday as commission members pressed those testifying — including representatives of antisemitism watchdogs StandWithUs and the Brandeis Center — on whether the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights should have its full funding back, and the costs and benefits of different government agencies’ own civil rights offices. They also made partisan jabs, with many accusing either the Biden or Trump administration of failing to protect Jewish students.
Craig Trainor, former acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, criticized the Biden administration for its slow pace in resolving antisemitism discrimination complaints at universities.
“The Biden Education Department’s Offices for Civil Rights’ policy agenda was deeply unserious and counterproductive and its response to the antisemitic harassment and violence consuming America’s college campuses was weak and ineffective,” Trainor said.
Kevin Rachlin, vice president for government relations and Washington director of the The Nexus Project, meanwhile, lambasted the Trump administration’s attempt to shrink the Office of Civil Rights.
“By closing those offices, by removing those personnel, by reducing those resources you have effectively hobbled the very organization that is dedicated to protecting not just Jewish students but all students,” Rachlin said.
Like her peers who testified over the past two days, Sultan-Reisler recounted specific incidents of antisemitic intimidation. She recalled that in November 2023, the words “Holocaust 2.0” were written in chalk on the campus sidewalk, and during an on-campus demonstration, a student waved the flag of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization. But said she didn’t think the Trump administration’s response to allegations of campus antisemitism had made her safer.
Among the other students testifying was Harvard University’s Tova Kaplan, who was one of 10 students to pen an op-ed last year arguing that Trump’s response to antisemitism had harmed research and academic freedom without helping Jewish students.
Others who testified, including many non-students and older adults, said they thought the Biden administration had been too reserved in tackling campus antisemitism and praised the Trump administration’s heavier-handed tactics.
“Despite the elimination of encampments and other results of the threat to withhold federal funding from schools which failed to protect Jewish students, the underlying hatred which gave rise to the encampments is alive and well and could explode again at any time,” said Leonard Gold, a retired attorney and the executive producer of “Blind Spot,” a documentary about campus antisemitism after Oct. 7.
Since 2025, the Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in HHS research grants for universities like Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton in an effort to coerce universities to comply with demands like making hiring, admissions, and course material changes. Harvard University defended its handling of campus antisemitism and decided to reject those demands.
The commission is accepting written testimonials until March 20. The commission’s report is expected by the end of the 2026 fiscal year.
The final report could feature more information from within federal agencies. In one tense exchange, Mondaire Jones, a Democrat and former congressman from New York who is one of the investigation’s chairs, asked Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Greg Dolin why the justice department had not yet handed over documents the commission requested.
“You have a statutory obligation to comply,” Jones said. “That is very clear under federal law.”
The post At US Commission on Civil Rights hearing, Jewish students warn against politicizing campus antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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After 4 years of war, Ukraine’s Jews adapt to a life of sirens, shortages and uncertainty
(JTA) — KYIV, Ukraine — Viktoria Maksimovich’s students at the Sha’alavim Jewish Day School no longer run for shelters when air raid sirens sound.
“They don’t want to hear the alarms. They don’t care about the shots and bombs. They don’t care about it. This is the biggest problem right now, as they won’t look for a shelter,” she said in a virtual interview from her school in Kharkiv, Ukraine. “It’s like usual life for them, and a lot of them grew up like this during the war and don’t remember normal life.”
Indeed, the Russian invasion, which marks its fourth anniversary on Tuesday, has reshaped everything in the lives of Ukrainian Jews, from big choices about whether to stay or flee to the seemingly mundane decision about whether to take the elevator or the stairs when visiting high-rise buildings.
With Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure a near-daily occurrence, taking the elevator means risking being trapped for hours if the power goes out. Recognizing that the dilemma has trapped elderly Jews in their homes, Maksimovich and her colleagues recently organized a service day for their students, who baked challahs and hiked up many flights of stairs to deliver them to Kharkiv’s elderly Jews.
“They managed it and were so happy about it because they met those old people and saw in their eyes, ‘You are here and brought us challahs and candles for Shabbat,’” Maksimovich recalled. “It was amazing.”
The fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion arrives in grim fashion for Ukrainians, with the Russian and Ukrainian armies locked in a bloody stalemate and support from the United States and Europe increasingly uncertain. Ukrainian cities are regularly barraged with drones and missiles, not only exacting a devastating tally of civilian deaths and injuries but making it increasingly challenging for Ukrainian civilians to carry out the basic functioning of their lives.
The last four months have been particularly challenging due to power and water cuts that have left Ukrainians frigid and in the dark. Whereas during the first three years of war, especially in the metropolitan center of Kyiv, life went on largely as normal, albeit punctuated by attacks. Now, mobile “resilience hubs” offering warming and charging dot the landscape, and the sound of generators is overpowering.
For Ukraine’s Jews, the situation means that children are gathering in bomb shelters to light Shabbat candles, the elderly rely on intermittent aid deliveries, and everyone is hunkered down for the worst winter since the war began.
“When the full-scale invasion began, I did not think it would last two weeks, but here we are,” said Julia Goldenberg, founder of the Ukrainian Charitable Funds and partner of World Jewish Relief. “And I still do not think the war will be over even this year.”
Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, there was a core Jewish population of 40,000 living in Ukraine. Since then, however, thousands have fled to Israel and Europe, reshaping hubs of Jewish life in the country. Now, with conditions worsening, even far from the front lines, Goldenberg expects even more to leave.
Many will be seeking security for their children, whose schooling and experiences have been peppered with trauma and interruption since even before the war. In-person schools had only resumed after a yearlong COVID closure for a semester before war broke out.
“Parents tell us of children who can’t sleep at night, children who react to all kinds of different sounds. It’s challenging to work with them,” said Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, who is based in Tel Aviv and travels to Ukraine regularly to lead Masorti Kyiv, one of the country’s only Conservative congregations.
Jewish schools have borne a wide range of effects. Ariel Markovitch, director of the JCC in Kyiv, recounted how a Russian missile struck the Perlina school and kindergarten in Kyiv in October 2024, where refugees fleeing fighting on the front lines in Ukraine’s east had been sleeping.
Inna Federova, 55, the head of Ukraine’s oldest Jewish day school, Lyceum No. 299 or Orach Chaim, said missiles were only one challenge of many.
“It fractured our community,” she said about the war. “I am a Jewish mother first, and I wanted to be there for the kids, but I couldn’t be once they were scattered all over Europe.”
At least one of the school’s alumni, Igor Tish, was gravely injured while fighting on the frontline, while the Israeli teachers who taught Hebrew and other subjects have not returned since being evacuated in the days before the Russian invasion. Instruction is more rudimentary now, Federova said.
“We have a physical education teacher who does exercises with the children in the shelter, because it’s very hard for them to sit still for so long without moving,” she said, adding: “They’ve lived through bombings, evacuations, constant anxiety. Our teachers received special training from psychologists, including Israeli specialists, on how to support children emotionally during wartime.”
Other support for Jews in Ukraine has come from the Joint Distribution Committee, which leads disaster response for Jewish communities living in conflict zones around the world ; Chabad, the global Jewish network whose emissaries are at the front line of Jewish life in many smaller communities; and Goldenberg’s group, which works to preserve Jewish life and welfare in Ukraine.
Sustained by a network of global donors, the Ukrainian Charitable Funds has helped elderly Jewish Ukrainians repair their homes after Russian airstrikes. Goldenberg recalled one woman she worked with: “She had no windows. She lost all of them in a Russian strike, but did not have the funds to fix them.”
While the advent of war in Israel in 2023 spurred concerns about whether Jewish donors would continue to send support to Ukraine, Gritsevskaya said aid from both inside and outside had made a difference.
“I think in the Jewish community, there is a huge sense of being hugged,” she said, adding, “Ukraine is an amazing example of the ability of Jews to unite and to help others in unbelievable situations. In general, I think that people who are connected to Jewish communities are more capable of going through the difficult things they go through because they have the wider Jewish world.”
Even as she gears up for a potential war in Israel, Gritsevskaya is planning on heading back to Ukraine this summer for another session of Ramah Ukraine, a camp that has already filled with Ukrainian Jewish teens eager for a respite from the challenges of war.
“I would rather not think of the fears I have,” she said. “They are so overwhelming, we have to focus on what must be done.”
Federova, too, said she continues to focus on the positives as she and her students start a fifth year of war.
“We have children from different backgrounds, some from observant families, some who are just discovering their roots, and the school gives them that connection,” Federova said about Orach Chaim. “Even during the hardest times when the alarms go off and when we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, I look at them and think ‘if we can give them knowledge and faith, then we have done something important.”
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.
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Anti-Zionist ‘Catholics for Catholics’ Group to Honor Carrie Prejean Boller at Event Featuring Candace Owens
Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February 2026 following outrage over her repeated downplaying of antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
Right-wing, anti-Zionist activist Carrie Prejean Boller, who was recently removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission over her conduct and repeated downplaying of antisemitism, will receive a “Catholic Champion” award next month at a gala organized by Catholics for Catholics, a group which urges Catholics to reject Zionism and promote American nationalism.
Prejean Boller’s behavior at a Feb. 9 commission hearing intended to address rising antisemitism in the United States included an impassioned defense of antisemitic personalities Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as her peddling of unsubstantiated claims that Israel has intentionally starved and murdered Palestinian civilians.
“I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” Prejean Boller said to Seth Dillon, CEO of the political satire site Babylon Bee, during the hearing. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop. I don’t know why you keep bringing her up, and Tucker.”
In January, Owens blamed Zionists for directing US President Donald Trump’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and chose to repost rapper Ye (former Kanye West)’s “Death Con 3 on Jewish People” tweet from 2022, praising the sentiment as a “whole vibe.” She has labeled Jews as “pedophilic,” accused them of murdering Christians, and blamed them for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in addition to making comments casting doubt on the Holocaust. In November, Owens admitted she had grown obsessed with the Jewish people.
During the hearing earlier this month, Prejean Boller, a former Miss California, also pressed witnesses, including Jewish religious leaders, on Israel and Zionism, questioning whether opposition to the Jewish state should be considered antisemitic, and castigated Israeli military action in Gaza. She donned a Palestinian flag pin on the lapel of her suit. Prejean Boller’s conduct drew audible boos from the audience and confusion from her colleagues, as well as widespread backlash online.
The next day, Prejean Boller posted on X defending herself, writing, “I will continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America. I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophesy [sic]. I am a free American. Not a slave to a foreign nation.”
The commission was established by US President Donald Trump to examine religious freedom issues and was intended to focus on concrete challenges facing Jewish communities, including bias and harassment. It is supposed to produce a report for Trump on religious liberty later this year.
Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas and chair of the commission, announced Prejean Boller’s expulsion from the panel on Feb. 11, saying she “hijacked” the hearing for her “own personal and political agenda.”
Then John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics, announced on Feb. 12 that Prejean Boller would receive his group’s “Catholic Champion” award at its upcoming March 19 Catholic Prayer for America Gala in Washington, DC. Speakers announced for the event include Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Owens, her former Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh, Father Chris Alar, Sister Dede Byrne, and Yep himself.
“Politics is always downstream from religion. While Catholics acknowledge that the modern 1948-State of Israel has a NATURAL right to exist, pushing a false ‘Biblical Mandate’ to support its domination of the entire Holy Land is neither Catholic, nor in America’s interests,” Yep stated. “Tragically, this theological error has often been used to justify both, horrific crimes against our Christian Palestinian brethren, and catastrophic foreign policy decisions by American leaders.”
Yep insists that his group only opposes Zionism and does not promote antisemitism.
“Of course as Catholics, antisemitism — hatred of Jews — is wrong,” Yep wrote. “But so is equivocating resisting ‘Zionism’ with hatred of Jews. This is what my fellow Catholic Carrie Prejean so boldly stood for on the panel for Religious Liberty.”
Yep frames his group’s purpose as defending Catholics for expressing their faith publicly. “When one of our own is out there bravely trying to stand up for what is right and is getting attacked, rest assured we won’t sit back,” he said. “We are a movement of faithful patriots that back frontline warriors like Carrie, who love God and the USA with the power of our Catholic faith.”
Simone Rizkallah, the director of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism, pushed back against Yep’s plans in a statement to the Christian Post calling Prejean Boller’s actions “inappropriate behavior that warranted her removal, as Lt. Gov. Patrick rightly determined.”
Rizkallah said that Prejean Boller “should not be rewarded for such conduct, nor should it be held up as a model of Catholic witness.”
“The violence against our Jewish friends that American Catholics have witnessed on American soil in the last few years should be enough to disturb us,” she added. “At the very least, it should alert us to the tone-deafness — if not outright malice — of Miss Prejean’s behavior and the scandal of celebrating it.”
After acknowledging that the Catholic Church disagreed theologically with Christian Zionists who come from an Evangelical tradition which regards the state of Israel through the lens of fulfilling Biblical prophecy, Rizkallah said that “while the Catholic Church does not embrace prophetic or eschatological forms of Christian Zionism, Catholic theology does leave room for distinctly Catholic theological reflection that affirms the enduring covenantal significance of the Jewish people and the moral legitimacy of Jewish self-determination in their historic homeland.”
Last month, Pope Leo XIV marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement reaffirming the Catholic Church’s “unwavering” opposition to antisemitism. He also concluded with a link to Nostra Aetate, a declaration from the Second Vatican Council and promulgated on Oct. 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI, that called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions. The theological reform called for a position of Christian-Jewish brotherhood, advocating “the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.”
Leo has made speaking out against rising antisemitism a topic of regular concern since his papacy began last year.
Catholics for Catholics, founded in 2022, describes itself as “a militant organization dedicated to the evangelization of this great country through public prayer, powerful media, and strategic political action. We’re warriors who love Christ, our Lady, and the USA.”
The group’s logo is a shield with the Virgin Mary in the foreground and a 1776 American flag in the background. It has received an endorsement from Trump who said “your love of God and Country is evident in everything you do. We admire your dedication to preserving America’s founding principles through your faith.”
In a statement, Catholics for Catholics claimed that Zionism “has too often warped the minds of Christians about their own faith, and deadened their hearts to the plight of their brethren in the Middle East.” The group said that Catholics were being intimidated to “speak about the 1948 State of Israel in a way they speak about no other nation. And if we don’t comply with their demands, they’ll slander us as ‘Antisemites.’”
On Feb. 10, Yep wrote on X that “if an American thinks it’s bad to have blind support for the Country of the VATICAN …for example send billions of tax pay dollars to them..or other things…We Catholics dont consider you ‘anti-catholic.’ We humbly ask you in return not to use your religion to make us blindly support a foreign nation and call us ‘anti semitic” if we dont. Thank you [sic]!”