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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 Pitt’ tackled the trauma of the Tree of Life attack. Here’s how survivors of the synagogue shooting reacted to the episode.
When Audrey Glickman, a lifelong Pittsburgher and a survivor of the Tree of Life massacre, sat down to watch The Pitt Friday morning, she knew exactly what was coming. And still she found herself moved by it.
On Thursday’s episode of the HBO Max medical drama, which is set in Pittsburgh, a patient arrives at the emergency room with a burn. It’s the Fourth of July. Fireworks crackle outside. In her kitchen, the woman had been using a samovar — a traditional metal urn often used in Jewish homes to heat water — when the sudden noise startled her and she dropped it.
The scalding water spilled onto her leg.
When her doctor asks what happened, she offers an explanation that reaches further back than the holiday. “I was on my way inside,” she says. “October 27, 2018.”
She doesn’t need to say more.
The episode never recreates the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. There are no gunshots, no flashbacks, no swelling score. Instead, the trauma surfaces the way it often does in real life: indirectly, years later, triggered by noise, memory, or the body’s refusal to forget. The scene assumes the audience already carries the weight of that day. That restraint reflects how the show has handled Jewish moments.
In its first season, The Pitt established – not through backstory but through behavior – that its protagonist, Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinovich (played by Noah Wyle), is Jewish. In one episode, after a brutal shift, he sits on the floor of a makeshift morgue, clutching a Star of David and reciting the Shema prayer. The moment is brief and unresolved; he later admits he isn’t even sure he believes the words he’s saying. It’s not a declaration of faith so much as a reflex — what surfaces when language runs out.
In the new episode, the survivor, named Yana Kovalenko and portrayed by actress Irina Dubova, asks Dr. Robby where he goes to synagogue.
“Rodef Shalom,” he replies, naming an actual Reform shul in Pittsburgh.
Kovalenko says she is a Tree of Life member and was at the synagogue on the day of the attack.
“They’re rebuilding,” Dr. Robby says.
“Yes, something new,” she says, adding, “Remember, rebuild, renew,” echoing the same phrase Tree of Life uses on its website.
That exchange gains more meaning if you know that Tree of Life is, in fact, rebuilding on its original site — and that, for now, its congregation meets in Rodef Shalom’s building. That insistence on local specificity extends beyond the script. Wyle, who is Jewish and whose parents met while attending college in Pittsburgh, has said authenticity is key to the series, which was inspired by the city’s Allegheny General Hospital.
Glickman said friends texted her about the episode Friday morning, so she was prepared for the reference but was still affected by how it unfolded.
“It’s really delightful,” she told the Forward. Not because every detail was perfect — she laughed about the accents, and the samovar struck her as more inherited than typical — but because the episode captured something truer than procedural accuracy.
“They do a lot of calling out of Pittsburgh,” Glickman said. “They treat it the way other shows treat New York or San Francisco. It lends authenticity, and it’s kind of exciting.”
Television often treats trauma as singular and spectacular, something that happens once and violently to one person at a time. The Pitt depicts it instead as communal and environmental, something that hums in the background long after the event itself has passed. “There is no clock on how long it takes,” Dr. Robby tells his patient.
Barry Werber, another Tree of Life survivor, knows that trauma personally. Werber was in the basement with his fellow congregants when they heard gunfire. He escaped into a storage room with two others, Carol Black and Melvin Wax. “We couldn’t find the light switch,” he later recalled. “It was pitch black.”
After a few moments, Wax, who was hard of hearing, thought the shooting had ended, so he took a fateful step outside the storage room and was instantly shot dead. His body fell back into the storage room, and the shooter, Robert Gregory Bowers, stepped inside. Through the darkness, Werber said, Bowers could not see Black hiding behind the door or himself toward the back of the room.
“To this day, I can’t go into a room and sit with my back facing the door,” he told the Forward.
Years later, that vigilance remains. Werber is still in therapy. He avoids crowds. He instinctively scans buildings for security. He attends synagogue services now via Zoom — partly because his wife is ill, and partly because being in a room full of people still doesn’t feel safe. “It took a lot out of me,” he said.
Werber, who worked for nearly 40 decades for the healthcare company that inspired the show, has yet to see the episode. He doesn’t subscribe to Max. “I spend enough on cable,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll get HBO. I’ll see if any of my friends have watched it.”
Carol Black, who was hiding in the same basement storage area as Werber during the attack, said the episode’s portrayal of flinching felt immediately familiar. “Every little unexpected sound still makes me jump,” she told the Forward. “If somebody sneezes and I’m not expecting it, I jump.” She said she has learned to live with the reflex. “You’re never going to get over it,” she said. “You just get used to it.”
Black, whose brother Richard Gottfried was among the 11 people killed in the shooting, said she was grateful to see the story reach a wider audience. “I don’t want the story of what we experienced to go cold,” she said. “This is a very popular show. People need to know about this.”
One of the episode’s most quietly revealing moments comes when the patient asks the nurse tending to her burns if she is Muslim. When the nurse says yes, the patient thanks her — not for the care she’s receiving in the room, but for what came years earlier. After the shooting, she recalls, it was the Muslim community that showed up, raised money, and paid for funerals.
Wyle, who also co-wrote this episode, told Variety that the interfaith solidarity “was the most underreported aspect of the story, and perhaps the most hopeful moving forward.” R. Scott Gemmill, an executive producer, added: “You can’t do a medical show, set in Pittsburgh, with a Jewish doctor without addressing that.”
The exchange in the episode is brief, almost awkward. The nurse doesn’t know what to say. The patient waves it off. “Anyway,” she says. “Thank you.” The show doesn’t pause to turn the moment into a lesson. It lets it pass, the way lived history often does.
That restraint resonated deeply with Glickman, who remembers the support across religious lines that followed the attack, and the ache of realizing how rare that feeling now seems. “I hope it means we’re going to get past the divisions we’re having right now,” she said. “We were there before. We can be there again.”
She also laughed at a detail few critics would think to note: Before arriving at the hospital, the patient treats her burns with honey. “That is so us,” Glickman said with a laugh. “That is so Jewish.”
#ThePitt’s Noah Wyle, who wrote Episode 3, talks with @TVLine Senior Editor Ryan Schwartz about revisiting the Tree of Life shooting and the Muslim community’s support and solidarity in the aftermath. https://t.co/KEHiBVeuUu pic.twitter.com/WTDSeL2Gkg
— TVLine.com (@TVLine) January 23, 2026
The post ‘The Pitt’ tackled the trauma of the Tree of Life attack. Here’s how survivors of the synagogue shooting reacted to the episode. appeared first on The Forward.
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Republican Rep. Calls on Georgia Hospital to Cut Ties With Iranian Regime-Connected Physician
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) Source: Youtube
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has called on Emory University and Georgia medical regulators to fire a physician with familial ties to a top Iranian official, amid international furor against that official for his role in the brutal suppression of protests in Iran.
In a letter dated Jan. 22, the Carter urged Emory University to terminate Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani’s appointment and asked the Georgia Composite Medical Board to revoke her medical license, arguing that her connection to her father, Ali Larijani, poses national security and patient trust concerns. The letter contends that allowing someone with such ties to practice medicine in the United States is “unacceptable,” especially given recent U.S. actions targeting Iran’s leadership and repression apparatus.
“Allowing an individual with immediate familial ties to a senior official actively calling for the death of Americans to occupy such a position poses a threat to patient trust, institutional integrity, and national security,” Carter wrote.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury this month sanctioned Larijani, who serves as Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, for his role in coordinating the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters that erupted in late 2025 and continued into January 2026. According to the Treasury, Larijani publicly called on security forces to use force against demonstrators demanding basic rights, and his actions are tied to thousands of deaths and injuries.
Those sanctions, announced Jan. 15 by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, target Larijani along with nearly two dozen other officials and shadow banking networks that finance the Iranian regime’s repression and global destabilizing activities. The move is part of a broader U.S. effort to increase economic pressure on Tehran, using executive authorities related to human rights abuses and support for terrorism.
The sanctions designation bars Larijani and the other named individuals from the U.S. financial system and prohibits American persons and companies from conducting business with them. Treasury officials said the measures also aim to disrupt the financial networks that allow Iran’s elite to launder revenue from petroleum and petrochemical sales funds that the U.S. says are diverted to repression and support for proxy groups abroad.
Larijani’s role in the crackdown has also been highlighted by a former Iranian government insider, who spoke with the IranWire outlet, alleging that Larijani played a central role in orchestrating the January 2026 suppression drawing comparisons to historic violent suppressions and suggesting the strategy was part of internal power consolidation within Iran’s leadership.
Protests that began in Iran in December have left at least 5,000 people dead, more than 7,300 injured and upwards of 26,800 detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The unrest was initially sparked by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, skyrocketing inflation, and a plummeting currency. However, the demonstrations quickly expanded into a wider movement opposing the country’s ruling establishment. Iranian authorities released their first official death toll on Wednesday, reporting 3,117 fatalities. The government said 2,427 of those killed were civilians or members of the security forces, while the remainder were labeled “terrorists,” without offering a detailed accounting of civilian versus security force casualties.
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Iran Claims Long-Range Missile Progress as US Boosts Military Presence Amid Deadliest Crackdown Since 1979
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 17, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran claimed this week it successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking the US’s East Coast, as Washington bolsters its military presence in the region and tensions soar amid Tehran’s intensifying crackdown on protesters.
According to state-affiliated media, the Iranian government conducted a successful missile launch test this week from an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base in Semnan, a city in north-central Iran, firing it toward Siberia with Russia’s approval.
Even though the missile was reported to have a range of up to 3,700 miles, it is unclear whether it reached its target, as the launch video shows little beyond a projectile soaring through the clouds.
Last year, a report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned that Iran could possess up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2035, signaling the regime’s growing long-range strike capabilities and the potential future threat to the US and its allies.
“Missile threats to the US homeland will expand in scale and sophistication in the coming decade,” the report said. “North Korea has successfully tested ballistic missiles with sufficient range to reach the entire Homeland, and Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
Meanwhile, as regional tensions mount over the regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, the United States has moved a range of military assets into the area — including the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group.
In the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that he may take “decisive” military action against Iran if the regime continues killing protesters.
“We’re watching Iran,” Trump said on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”
“We have a large fleet moving into the region. We’ll see what happens if we have to use it,” he continued. “We are building a very large force there, and we are closely monitoring their actions.”
For his part, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Thursday accused the United States and Israel of fueling the widespread anti-government protests, calling it a “cowardly revenge … for the defeat in the 12-Day War.”
IRGC commander Gen. Mohammad Pakpour also threatened Israel and the United States over any potential military action, warning them to “avoid any miscalculations” to prevent what he described as a “more painful and regrettable fate.”
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and dear Iran have their finger on the trigger, more prepared than ever, ready to carry out the orders and measures of the supreme commander-in-chief,” Pakpour was quoted as saying by local media.
With pressure mounting at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
With demonstrations now stretching over three weeks, the protests have grown into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
According to the US-based human rights group HRANA, 4,519 people have been killed during the protests, with another 9,049 fatalities under review. At least 5,811 people have been injured, and 26,314 arrests have been recorded.
Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher.
On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council said that the current wave of violence against protesters is “the deadliest crackdown since the 1979 Islamic Revolution,” citing credible evidence that the actual death toll is “much higher” than official figures, which already run into the thousands.
With Iranian authorities maintaining an internet blackout for over two weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.