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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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Most Europeans Consider Antisemitism an ‘Important’ Problem, Say Gaza War Influences Views of Jews: EU Survey
Anti-Israel protesters march in Germany, March 26, 2025. Photo: Sebastian Willnow/dpa via Reuters Connect
Over half of Europeans view antisemitism as a serious problem in their countries, with almost seven in ten saying the war in Gaza influences how Jewish people are perceived, according to a new European Union survey published this week as hostility toward Jews and Israelis across the continent shows no sign of easing.
Released on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the European Commission’s Eurobarometer, which surveyed some 25,000 respondents, found that 69 percent of Europeans now believe that “conflicts in the Middle East” influence how Jewish people are perceived — up from 54 percent in a previous survey before the conflict.
The data also revealed that 55 percent of respondents consider antisemitism an “important” problem in their home country, with nearly half saying it has grown over the past five years and a large majority warning that hostility toward Jews in public places remains a serious concern.
Western countries, especially those with large Muslim-majority immigrant populations, expressed the greatest concern about rising antisemitism and were most likely to link it to Israel, revealing sharp differences across European Union member states.
For example, only 9 percent of respondents in Estonia said antisemitism was a problem, followed by Finland, Latvia, Malta, and Slovakia ranging from 16 to 21 percent.
However, 70 to 74 percent of respondents in countries such as France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands saw antisemitism as a serious threat.
“Jewish culture is woven into the fabric of European history. We must protect and nurture this today and well into the future,” EU Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner said in a statement.
Today, Europe is home to nearly 30 percent of all Israelis living outside the country — roughly 190,000 to 200,000 people — with their population steadily increasing across the continent, according to a report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR).
Yet governments and Jewish security organizations across the continent have documented a dramatic rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Germany recorded more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — nearly double pre-Oct. 7, 2023, levels.
In the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST) — a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters — recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents from January to June last year. This was the second-highest number of antisemitic crimes ever recorded by CST in the first six months of any year, following 2,019 incidents in the first half of 2024.
France presents a similar pattern. According to the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct.7 atrocities.
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‘You’re Disgusting’: University of Miami Sophomore Harasses ‘Students Supporting Israel’ Campus Group
Kaylee Mahoney, a University of Miami student and conservative influencer who verbally attacked Jewish students on campus on Jan. 27, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
A sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami on Tuesday verbally attacked a Jewish student group, leading the school to defend free speech while saying that “lines can be crossed” in response.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” Kaylee Mahony yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
Mahony can also be heard in video of the incident responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Later, Mahony, whose statements were first reported by The Miami Hurricane student newspaper, took to social media, where she has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, and posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
Mahony is the head of public relations for the university’s College Republicans and the head of social media for Turning Point Miami, according to her LinkedIn.
The Miami Hurricane reported that, until Tuesday evening, Mahony’s Instagram and Tiktok bios included “Proud Goy” — a term referring to non-Jews.
Students told The Miami Hurricane that Mahony also charged that “rabbis eat babies” while harassing SSI. Nonetheless, Mahony reportedly defended her conduct, saying, “Referencing the disgusting verses of the Talmud is not being antisemitic. Asking someone about the book that they use as their moral compass isn’t antisemitic.”
The Talmud, a key source of Jewish law, tradition, and theology, is often misrepresented by antisemitic agitators in an effort to malign the Jewish people and their religion.
However, the University of Miami did not mention antisemitism in its statement on the incident.
“The University of Miami is aware of the exchange that occurred between students Tuesday afternoon,” the school said in a statement. “We strongly support our students’ rights to freedom of expression. However, we understand lines can be crossed. As such, the university has proactive policies in place to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all students.”
The statement went on to say that the university “remains committed to maintaining a campus environment where every student feels safe, welcome, and supported.”
According to The Miami Hurricane, the College Republicans terminated Mahony’s membership in the club.
Tuesday’s incident comes as right-wing antisemitism is surging in popularity among conservative youth, seemingly in part due to the influence of online influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson.
In September, a conservative magazine at Harvard University published an opinion piece which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.
Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”
Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own” in response to concerns over large-scale migration of Muslims into Europe.
In Nazi ideology, “blood and soil,” or Blut und Boden, encapsulated the party’s belief in eugenics and racial purity; the German “Aryans’” right to expand into Eastern Europe to amass new Lebensraum, or “living space”; and the transformation of the German peasantry into an agricultural class which stood in contrasts to Jews, many of whom lived in cities.
Meanwhile, antisemitic hate crimes have spiked to record levels across the US.
Earlier this month, Stephen Pittman, 19, allegedly ignited a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. After being arrested, Pittman confessed and told US federal investigators that he targeted the institution over its “Jewish ties,” according to court filings.
As he allegedly carried out the act, Pittman notified his father of it via text message, saying “I did my research.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Anti-Israel Candidates for US Senate Boast Strong Polling Numbers in Michigan Democratic Primary
Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat running for US Senate in Michigan. Photo: Screenshot
Mallory McMorrow, a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza and a candidate for the US Senate in Michigan, holds a narrow lead over the rest of the Democratic primary field, according to a new poll.
The Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey shows McMorrow, a member of the Michigan state Senate, ahead of the pack with 22 percent of the vote. US Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) sits in second place with 17 percent of the vote. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician with an anti-Israel policy platform, holds a respectable 16 percent of the primary vote.
McMorrow’s lead over the field may spark consternation among supporters of Israel, whose defensive military campaign in Gaza has been characterized by McMorrow as tantamount to “genocide.”
Just days before the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, McMorrow called Israel’s response in Gaza a “moral abomination,” saying it was “just as horrendous” as the attack carried out by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists, who perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
However, in a recent interview, McMorrow indicated tentativeness over her previous condemnation of Israel, admitting that the word “genocide” has become a “purity test” among progressive activists in Democratic primaries.
“I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can’t not be heartbroken,” McMorrow said during an interview earlier this month. “But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word — a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral — and we’re losing sight of what I believe is a broadly shared goal among most Michiganders, that this violence needs to stop, that a temporary ceasefire needs to become a permanent ceasefire, that Palestinians deserve long term peace and security, that Israelis deserve long term peace and security, and that should be the role of the next US senator.”
Conversely, Stevens has established herself as the favorite among pro-Israel Michiganders. Stevens scored an endorsement from the Democratic Majority for Israel in November 2025. In a statement, DMFI praised Stevens as someone who has “stood firm against extremism, antisemitism, and efforts to undermine America’s alliances.”
Stevens has routinely touted her pro-Israel bona fides, vowing to stand beside the closest US ally in the Middle East despite mounting pressure by party activists to cut ties with the Jewish state. The lawmaker promised that if elected she would continue to support legislation which bolsters Israel’s security.
“As a proud pro-Israel Democrat, I believe America is stronger when we stand with our democratic allies, confront antisemitism and extremism, and keep our promises to our friends abroad and our working families here at home,” Stevens said in a statement. “In the Senate, I’ll keep fighting to protect our democracy, support Israel’s security, ensure the ceasefire holds in Gaza, and deliver for Michiganders in every corner of our state.”
El-Sayed, the most far-left candidate in the race, has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” The comment came before the Israeli military launched its ground campaign in Gaza.
He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing, “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that they should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting military aid for Israel, saying, “We should be spending that money here at home.”
Earlier this month, The Algemeiner reported that El-Sayed is facing scrutiny over his past fundraising and public support for a political advocacy group whose affiliates organized anti-Israel protests at Holocaust memorial sites in Washington, DC, and the Detroit metro area.