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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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Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.
Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.
While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.
At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.
At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.
“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.
The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.
“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”
To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”
She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.
“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”
This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.
“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.
“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”
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Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk
(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi.
The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.
Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.
Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.
“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.
He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.
“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.
Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.
“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.
The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.
Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.
The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.
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Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota
(JTA) — At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.
In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”
In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”
The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.
While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”
Dozens of the rabbis on the ground Friday were activated through T’ruah, the Jewish social justice network. Also present were Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the Union for Reform Judaism’s religious action center; Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook; Bend the Arc CEO Jamie Beran; and members of Conservative Judaism’s social justice commission, among others.
“It’s all rooted in the biblical commandment that we were slaves in Egypt, and we’re to love the stranger,” Pesner told TC Jewfolk, a local Jewish news site. “The biblical text repeats that 36 different times in 36 different ways, and it really calls our clergy to action.”
The airport protest was just one of several anti-ICE events that local and national clergy staged in the Twin Cities area Friday, amid frigid temperatures that saw wind chill as low as 40-below. Temple Israel, a prominent Reform congregation in Minneapolis, also hosted an interfaith prayer service.
“Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” Temple Israel Senior Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman told the gathered crowd Friday morning, to applause.
After extolling the virtues of the region’s diversity, Zimmerman added, “When I began this work, and I was ordained in 1988, I said these words. But it wasn’t against the reality that we have today. Now we have to walk these words. We have to live these words. And it is, in my mind, the moment that history will define us. And guess what, history is on our side.”
Another local Jewish leader took a different protest tactic, urging a day of fasting on Friday.
“In Jewish tradition, when a community faces crisis, violence, injustice or moral collapse, we do not look away. The Talmud describes an ancient custom of instituting communal fast days,” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said during an interfaith press conference earlier in the week. “Fasting is not about self-affliction. It is about clarity. It is about refusing to numb ourselves to suffering.”
Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday, where he sought to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies while also hoping to “turn down the temperature.”
Faith communities have emerged as a crucial dimension of the protests, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing Thursday the arrests of three anti-ICE protesters who had been involved in disrupting a church service over the weekend. A planned anti-ICE rally in New York City Friday afternoon was set to feature Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, as one of the speakers.
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