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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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The post Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The New Normal for Jewish Students: Security Checks and Police Presence
Cornwall House at King’s College London. Photo: C. G. P. Grey.
In February 2026, a university screening at King’s College London required an astonishing level of security: 30 police officers and 15 professional security personnel for 20 students and five members of the university’s staff.
The reason? A 47-minute film of raw footage from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack was screened, showing what actually happened that day.
An earlier attempt by the local student Israel Society to hold the screening had been abandoned entirely because the university didn’t grant permission on security grounds.
Outside of the event, protesters from the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter chanted “Get the Zios off campus.”
Jewish students must operate behind visible layers of protection simply to gather, pray, eat, or learn together. Activities that were once routine campus activities now demand the same level of protection more commonly associated with high-profile political events, raising serious questions about what the campus “normal” has become.
As someone who has experienced this situation firsthand, the heavy use of security is not symbolic. It reflects real, credible threats of disruption and intimidation that have already forced events to be cancelled.
Jewish students now require visible police protection for activities that every other group takes for granted — a film screening, a cultural night, a Shabbat dinner. This is not discomfort; it is unequal access to campus life. The activism that claims to defend the vulnerable has instead made Jewish students the ones who need defending.
The reason stories like these keep happening is clear and uncomfortable: Anti-Zionism has increasingly become the dominant expression of discrimination and bigotry against Jews on campus. What commonly presents itself as “political criticism of Israel” quickly turns into intimidation, harassment, and exclusion regardless of any individual Zionist-identified individual’s views.
Universities that continue to outsource safety to police cordons while wringing their hands about “tensions” are simply managing symptoms. They are not addressing the root cause.
Chants that single out “Zios,” accusations of collective guilt, and the assumption that any Jewish event is somehow provocative have turned Jewish identity into a liability. This is not abstract theory. Jewish students report being chased, threatened, verbally abused, and physically targeted simply for being visibly Jewish or Israeli. Many now hide Stars of David, stop speaking Hebrew in public, or avoid Jewish spaces altogether to stay safe.
And what happened at my school is happening to students all over the UK. The Union of Jewish Students’ March 2026 national polling of 1,000 students found that nearly a quarter had witnessed behavior specifically targeting Jewish students for their religion or ethnicity. The poll also found that 77% of those who see Israel-Palestine protests regularly witnessed slogans or chants directly justifying the October 7 attack.
The pattern is consistent: hostility that begins with Israel is commonly expressed through hostility toward the nearest Jews who don’t actively identify as anti-Zionist, and those who attempt to humanise the Jews of Israel. The political rhetoric saying “it’s only about Israel” is just a disguise.
This situation is bad for Jewish students, but it is also corrosive for universities themselves. When institutions must essentially militarize everyday student activity to keep one minority safe, they have already failed their basic duty to provide an equal learning environment.
Free speech is not the issue here. Protest and legitimate criticism of any government must be protected. However, what should not be protected is the right to harass, intimidate, or exclude Jewish students under the guise of activism. Distinguishing between the two is a key element of the widely accepted IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Universities know what needs to be done. Our leaders have been telling them for years. First, enforce existing codes of conduct without hesitation whenever harassment or intimidation occurs, without selective blindness or “context” excuses that only apply to Jews.
Second, apply free speech rules equally. Disruption that prevents Jewish students from accessing events or education is not protected speech; it is a violation of rights.
Third, publicly rebuke the notion that pro-Israel events are inherently provocative. A Shabbat dinner is not a political statement. A screening of actual footage is not a provocation.
These activists will wrongly argue that enforcing such policies amounts to censorship. But in Western civilization, nobody is free to do whatever they want, regardless of their effect on others. They are free to voice their opposition, but not to impose it on others.
Curtailing this behavior is the minimum requirement for any university campus and a healthy community.
A “fortified” campus is not a solution — it is an admission of failure. Until universities confront the reality that anti-Zionism produces the same result as antisemitism, Jewish students will continue to need physical protection to live normal student lives.
The question is no longer whether this climate exists; it’s whether university leadership — including at King’s College — has the courage to act on it.
Alena Rakitina is a student of the University of Exeter and a CAMERA on Campus 2025-2026 Fellow. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
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Rahm Emanuel’s Call to Treat Israel ‘Like Every Other Ally’ Gets History Wrong
Rahm Emanuel speaks during a media interview with podcast host Megyn Kelly. Photo: Screenshot
Rahm Emanuel’s recent declaration that Israel should henceforth be treated “like every other ally” was not serious strategic analysis. It was the sound of a longtime Democratic operative adjusting himself to the increasingly radicalized gravitational pull of his party’s anti-Israel wing.
The same political ecosystem now mainstreaming figures like Hasan Piker — a man who declared that “America deserved 9/11” and routinely traffics in hateful anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda to millions — is steadily dragging Democratic rhetoric on Israel into territory that would have been politically radioactive even a decade ago.
Like others making similar arguments, Emanuel’s slogan collapses under even minimal historical scrutiny.
When looking at the evidence, it’s clear that Israel is already treated unlike many American allies.
First, some allies, like NATO members, are entitled to American military protection and defense if they are attacked. When Israel fights wars, Israelis fight them. That distinction matters enormously. Yet people like Rahm speak as though Israel is uniquely coddled rather than uniquely self-reliant.
Emanuel — who somehow served as ambassador to Japan while apparently learning little from the experience about how American alliances actually work — recently stated that the US should stop “subsidizing” Israel’s military and stop providing “financial aid” through the Memorandum of Understanding framework, and that Israel should instead simply “buy what they want” like every other ally.
The aid framework Rahm now caricatures as “subsidies” and “financial aid” was never an act of American charity. It emerged from strategic bargains and overlapping interests that benefited Washington enormously.
A major turning point in that strategic bargain came in the 1980s with Israel’s Lavi fighter project — an ambitious domestically developed fighter program that many in Washington feared could become a genuine export competitor to the F-16.
American pressure to terminate the program was immense because, contrary to today’s woke-right and far-left parody of the alliance, Washington was not interested in an Israeli aerospace rival competing with American defense giants globally.
Under that pressure, Israel closed the program.
The result was deeper Israeli integration into American military platforms and supply chains — strengthening American aerospace dominance while locking Israel more tightly into the American defense ecosystem.
In other words, the architecture Rahm now dismisses as though it were unilateral charity did not emerge because Washington was engaged in philanthropy for Jews. It emerged because American policymakers concluded that the arrangement benefited the United States strategically, militarily, technologically, and industrially.
Almost all US military assistance to Israel is effectively spent in America on American systems built by American workers in American factories. Meanwhile, Israel became one of the most battle-tested laboratories for American military doctrine and technology anywhere in the world — missile defense, cyber operations, tunnel warfare, counterterrorism, intelligence integration, and urban combat.
American defense officials do not maintain these relationships because they are sentimental Zionists at the Pentagon. They maintain them because Israel provides enormous strategic value to the United States.
But the most absurd part of Emanuel’s slogan remains the slogan itself.
Because when Rahm says Israel should be treated “like every other ally,” he ignores the fact that Israel receives less benefits than many “other allies.”
Japan gets treaty guarantees. South Korea gets treaty guarantees and American troops on its front line – the DMZ. NATO states get the full weight of American deterrence and outsized military spending – compared to all other NATO countries, as the US accounts for roughly 70% of all NATO defense expenditures.
The Gulf monarchies host sprawling American military infrastructure protecting regimes that likely would not survive long without it.
Israel often gets lectures about “restraint” while fighting enemies openly committed to its destruction.
Israel gets told that the world’s only Jewish state — smaller than New Jersey and surrounded for decades by forces openly calling for its annihilation — should somehow behave like Holland while confronting enemies that behave more like ISIS with better public relations.
And through all of this, Israelis themselves still do the fighting.
That is the part the “subsidy” rhetoric always conceals.
When Hezbollah launches rockets into northern Israel, American Marines do not fight in southern Lebanon. When Hamas massacres Israeli civilians, American reservists are not mobilized into Gaza. When Iran openly threatens both the United States and Israel, American parents are not preparing their children for compulsory military service. Israelis are. That is not “special treatment.”
That’s why Emanuel’s rhetoric sounds less like strategy and more like ideological adaptation – the repositioning of a Democratic politician trying to survive a party increasingly shaped by activists who understand the Middle East primarily through slogans, intersectional dogma, and social media propaganda rather than military history or strategic reality.
For decades, American policymakers understood that Israel represented something uniquely valuable to the United States — a stable, democratic, technologically advanced regional power willing to fight its own wars without demanding or requiring American soldiers to die for it. Now figures like Rahm Emanuel speak as though this arrangement was some kind of American charity or a bad deal.
But it’s not — it’s a strategic partnership, and one squarely in America’s interest.
That consensus, however, is increasingly being subordinated to internal party pressures. The Democratic establishment’s attempts to placate the anti-Israel activist left will likely work about as well as it worked for Biden and Harris in 2024 — never anti-Israel enough to satisfy the far-left and Islamist activist ecosystem, but anti-Israel enough to alienate moderates, independents, and pro-American voters.
The party will soon likely decide if it should become outright hostile to voters — but history rarely rewards political classes that mistake ideological fashion for strategic wisdom. Rahm Emanuel should know that by now.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Sheila Reich, beloved LA Yiddish teacher, has died
שיינדל „שילאַ“ רײַך, אַ פּאָפּולערע לאַנגיאָריקע ייִדיש־לערערין אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, איז לעצטנס אַוועק אין דער אייביקייט. זי איז געווען 80 יאָר אַלט.
איך האָב געקענט שילאַן במשך פֿון מער װי אַ פֿערטל יאָרהונדערט אָבער בײַ מיר האָט זי געהייסן בלויז שיינדל. ערשט הײַיאָר, אויף איר 80סטן געבורירן־טאָג האָב איך אױסגעפֿונען אַז בײַ אַלע אַנדערע האָט זי געהײסן „שילאַ“.
יאָרן לאַנג איז שײנדל געװען אַ ייִדיש־לערערין אין פֿאַרשידענע אינסטיטוציעס איבער לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס. איך אַלײַן בין קיין מאָל נישט געווען בײַ איר אין קלאַס אָבער מײַן װײַב טעמע האָט זיך יאָרן לאַנג געלערנט בײַ איר. אַלס לערערין איז שײנדל געװען אויסערגעוויינטלעך. אין אַ טיפּישן קלאַס זענען די סטודענטן געווען אױף פֿאַרשידענע ניװאָען, פֿון אַבסאָלוטע אָנהײבער ביז אַװאַנסירט. דאָך האָט זי זיך אָפּגעגעבן מיט יעדן אײנעם באַזונדער. ווי אַ רעזולטאַט האָט די ייִדיש־קענטעניש בײַ יעדן סטודענט זיך פֿאַרבעסערט.
װי איך אַלײן, און ווי אַ סך פֿון אירע סטודענטן, איז שיינדל געװען אַ קינד פֿון דער שארית־הפּליטה. זינט די קינדעריאָרן האָבן מיר בײדע גערעדט ייִדיש מיט אונדזערע טאַטע־מאַמע. (זי האָט אויך גערעדט ייִדיש מיט איר זון, אַבֿי.) פֿאַקטיש איז ייִדיש פֿאַר אונדז בײדן געװען די ערשטע שפּראַך. אַן אונטערשייד פֿון צען יאָר צווישן אונדז, איז שיינדל אין מײַנע אױגן געװען די עלטערע שװעסטער װאָס איך האָב נישט געהאַט. אין אונדזערע פֿיל שמועסן האָבן מיר גערעדט אױף מאַמע־לשון. חס־וחלילה מיר זאָלן רעדן אױף דער גױישער שפּראַך! אַזױ װי איך, האָט זי געקענט צענדליקער, אױב נישט הונדערטער יִידישע אױסדרוקן, שפּריכװערטער און חכמות. מיר האָבן אָפֿט זיך געטיילט מיט די אויסדרוקן און תּמיד הנאה געהאַט ווען מיר האָבן זיך דערוווּסט אַ נײַ ווערטל.
יאָרן לאַנג איז שײנדל אויך געװען אַ מיטגליד פֿון אונדזער לײענקרײַז אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס. טראָץ דעם װאָס זי איז געװען אַ ייִדיש־לערערין האָט זי זיך קיין מאָל נישט געהאַלטן העכער פֿון אונדז. . אָט זענען עטלעכע:
„זומער און װינטער ליגט אים אין מױל“ — אַ פּאַטאַלאָגישער ליגנער. דער ליגן בלײַבט אין זײַן מױל אַ גאַנץ יאָר.
„עס גײט מיר אן אַזױ ווי דער פֿאַריאָריקער שנײ.“
„איך האָב נישט אַפֿילו קײַן כּוח צו חלשן.“
„קושװאָך“ — „האָנימון“. איז דאָס נישט חנעװדיק?
שײנדל איז געװען אַן אשת־חיל, מיט אַ פֿינקל אין אױג. איך, צוזאַמען מיט די מיטגלידער פֿון אונדזער לײענקרײַז און די אָנצאָליקע סטודענטן במשך פֿון די יאָרן, װעלן שטאַרק בענקען נאָך איר. כּבֿוד איר אָנדענק!
The post Sheila Reich, beloved LA Yiddish teacher, has died appeared first on The Forward.