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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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Instagram Pushes Antisemitic Videos to Hundreds of Millions of Users, Report Finds
Silhouettes of mobile users are seen next to a screen projection of the Instagram logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Instagram actively recommends bigoted content to its users, according to newly published research from a leading antisemitism watchdog group.
The revelation followed two high-profile losses this week in lawsuits that charged billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Instagram, with failing to protect children on its social media platforms.
On Wednesday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) published new findings from its Antisemitism Research Center (ARC). The report, “Engineered Exposure: How Antisemitic Content Is Pushed and Amplified to Millions Across Instagram,” focused on tracking 100 antisemitic posts during a 96-hour period which Instagram directly pushed into users’ accounts through its own recommendation system.
CAM’s researchers found that these posts provoked 5.3 million likes and 3.8 million shares, which analysts estimate reached as many as 280 million users.
“Among the most disturbing findings is that the ARC researchers identified AI-generated ‘rabbi’ personas that were fabricated to push antisemitic tropes while projecting false religious authority,” CAM said in a statement announcing the report.
One bogus rabbi account CAM uncovered had collected more than 1.4 million followers. The report described how an account called Rabbi Goldman “pushes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including allegations of Jewish control of the global financial system, to a large audience, with some videos getting more than five million views.”
ARC identified 11 other fake rabbis, bringing the total followers for such accounts up to 2.1 million. According to the researchers, “each presents a distinct persona and voice, yet all promote narratives portraying Jews as obsessed with money, playing to classical antisemitic stereotypes.”
The report also documented substantial linking of Jews with occult themes including references to demons, Satan, 666, Moloch, freemasonry, the Illuminati, and especially the ancient Canaanite storm god Baal. The slander against Jews as secretly worshipping a deity who demanded child sacrifice and rivaled the God of Israel in the Bible has manifested elsewhere on social media. Far-right podcaster Candace Owens has claimed that the Star of David has “ALWAYS [sic] been associated with Canaanite cults and Baal worship.”
An important component of this new research is that rather than investigators searching for hateful content, they relied solely on “the standard use of Instagram over four days, via content actively suggested by the platform’s recommendation systems.”
“This distinction demonstrates that exposure to these narratives does not require users to seek out extremist material,” the researchers explained. “Instead, the platform itself can act as a vector, introducing and amplifying such content through its own distribution mechanisms.”
Through providing examples of the content analyzed, the researchers showed how conspiracy theories transition into calls for violence. One video discussed in the report blamed “the Rothschilds” and central banks as guilty of causing all global crises including wars, diseases, and 9/11. The video then “escalates into explicit eliminationist rhetoric, calling for their eradication as a solution. It uses the Rothschild family as a proxy for Jews and frames them as a singular, malevolent force controlling world events.”
CAM CEO Sacha Roytman said the report provided evidence “of a broad systemic failure on the part of Instagram and Meta.”
“When a platform actively recommends content that dehumanizes Jews to mass audiences, we are no longer talking about a simple oversight or a mistake in the algorithmic design. We are talking about infrastructure that normalizes hatred at scale that must be addressed immediately,” he added.
Regarding potential motivations for what might have inspired Zuckerberg to allow for such a proliferation of hate, the report noted in its introduction that Meta had been “generating substantial advertising revenue from engagement with the content in question.”
In 2025, Meta’s revenue reached $200.966 billion, an increase of 22.17 percent from 2024, when revenue hit $164.501 billion, a 21.94 percent increase from 2023’s $134.9 billion, which in turn had grown 15.69 percent from 2022.
Bloomberg currently ranks Zuckerberg as the fifth wealthiest person on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $211 billion. Earlier this month, he purchased a $170 million mansion in South Florida’s Indian Creek, noted as the most expensive sale in Miami-Dade County and listed as “the largest residence ever created on Miami’s most exclusive island.”
On Wednesday, Meta laid off 700 employees, largely those affiliated with the failed Reality Labs division, which burned through $80 billion in pursuit of creating the virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds. The platform will shut down on June 15.
Roytman said that Meta “must take a hard look at how its algorithms are promoting antisemitic content and put real, transparent safeguards in place to stop it.”
Meta may have additional motivation now to level up the safety protocols on its platforms following back-to-back decisions in a pair of lawsuits this week which, legal analysts suspect, may have now opened the floodgates for thousands of similar cases around the country.
On Tuesday in Santa Fe, jurors found Meta liable and imposed a $375 million fine for failing to prevent minors’ exposure to harmful sexual content including online solicitations, human trafficking, and explicit imagery.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement following the verdict. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
Torrez vowed to go after Meta for more money and force changes to the platforms.
“New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids,” Torrez said. “In the next phase of this legal proceeding, we will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that offer stronger protections for children.”
On Wednesday in Los Angeles, jurors found Meta and Alphabet (parent company of YouTube) liable for the addictive qualities of their platforms exacerbating the mental health problems of a young woman and awarded her $3 million in damages with $3 million more in punitive damages.
Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told the Wall Street Journal that “what is new is the addiction element.” He warned “that could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction, there is something very abstract about it.”
Meta and Alphabet both plan to appeal the ruling. Alphabet spokesman José Castañeda sought to distance the company from Meta (which jurors found more heavily liable at a 70-30 penalty ratio), saying “this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Previous legal challenges to social media and online video companies for failing to prevent exposure to harmful content have usually failed due to longstanding legal interpretations of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This statute has prevented plaintiffs from suing a website’s host the way they would an individual committing slander or a publisher engaged in libel. The legal innovation which allowed for success in these cases was lawyers’ decision to focus not on the content itself but on the design of the products which intended to hold users captivated, glued to their phones for hours.
“They knew,” said Mark Lanier, the lawyer for the 20-year-old plaintiff in the addiction case. “They targeted the children.”
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University of Wisconsin–Madison Denounces BDS Resolution Passed by Student Government
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on May 1, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s student government on Wednesday passed a resolution which endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and demanded the institution divest from companies involved financially with Israel, drawing a stern rebuke from the school’s administration.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the resolution accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence … at the intersections of race, gender, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.” It also compares Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against the terrorist group Hamas to the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan (RSF), a notorious paramilitary group responsible for a slew of war crimes and premeditated mass casualties of civilians.
After failing to reach the floor for a vote when the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) first considered it last week, it was approved during an evening session on Wednesday. The body has not yet released the final tallies of the vote, but the UW Madison administration confirmed that it passed in a statement which condemned the outcome.
The university also said it was “reviewing reports alleging that an online chat, including possibly some ASM representatives, used an antisemitic term in reference to limiting potential speakers at the March 18 ASM meeting” where the resolution was considered.
According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, an SJP member told their contact in ASM via text message to slash the time allotted for public comment because the “proportion of Zios [sic] rises as the speaker list goes on.”
“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.
Noting that the resolution “issued a number of flawed, unrelated and illegal demands,” the administration said in Wednesday’s response to the vote that “Wisconsin state law prohibits state and local government agencies from adopting their own rules or policies that would involve them in a boycott of Israel” and that “ASM leadership was counseled by university attorneys on the clear illegality of that specific part of the resolution” but “nonetheless voted to pass it.”
The administration did not condemn BDS as matter of principle, however, but said that UW-Madison “condemns antisemitism in all of its forms” in regard to the “Zio” text message.
Formally launched in 2005, the BDS movement opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
The apparent antisemitic undertones of the ASM vote at the University of Wisconsin-Madison underscore the reality of campus antisemitism and the degree to which it has changed Jewish student life.
According to a recent survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International, a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
The survey, included in AJC’s new “The State of Antisemitism in America” report, added that 32 percent of Jewish students feel that campus groups promote antisemitism or a learning environment that is hostile to Jews, while 25 percent said that antisemitism was the basis of their being “excluded from a group or an event on campus.”
Jewish students endure these indignities while preserving their overwhelming support for Israel. Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed identified caring about Israel as a central component of Jewish identity and 76 percent agreed that calling for its destruction or describing it as an illegitimate state is antisemitic.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Lowers Minimum Age for War Roles to 12, Sparking Outcry Over Child Soldier Use
Kids hold up an Iranian flag and chant slogans during a protest against the Israeli airstrikes on Iran, in Sana a, Yemen, June 20, 2025. Photo: IMAGO/Hamza Ali via Reuters Connect
The Iranian regime has lowered the minimum age for participation in war-related activities to just 12 years old, a move that will likely fuel the concerns of human rights groups, which have condemned Iran’s treatment of children.
In a televised interview with state media, Rahim Nadali, a cultural with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran, announced that the new initiative “For Iran” is recruiting participants to assist with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
“Since children are increasingly volunteering to take part, we have lowered the minimum age to 12,” Nadali said, urging young children to join the war effort if they wish.
Rahim Nadali, Cultural Deputy of the IRGC’s Tehran branch (Mar 26, 2026):
“12 and 13-year-old children wanted to participate in Basij checkpoints across the cities. We have lowered the age limit to 12 and above.” pic.twitter.com/lLZy9pU5xm— حافظه تاریخی (@hafezeh_tarikhi) March 26, 2026
Iran International first reported Nadali’s statement, which has since circulated on social media.
As part of the regime’s state media coverage of the US-Israeli war against Iran, this latest announcement has ignited mounting backlash over the use of minors in security‑related roles — a practice that is not new in Iran.
“Recruiting children into military activity is a violation of international laws and the international community must not stay silent,” Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad posted on social media, along with video of Nadali’s comments. “This is the same regime that lectures the world about morality. But when it comes to survival? They’re willing to send children into danger.”
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s move flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human rights groups have also repeatedly accused Iranian security forces of killing child protesters during past crackdowns.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, more than 200 children were killed during the nationwide anti‑government protests earlier this year, which security forces violently crushed, leaving thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also documented cases of children being shot, detained, and abused during these latest demonstrations, noting that government forces have repeatedly targeted minors in ways that breach international law.
Iran has a long track record of widespread human rights abuses, including crackdowns on protesters, harassment of activists, threats to minorities, executions of children, violations of women’s rights, and dire prison conditions.
During the January uprising, at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed, with another 11,744 cases still under verification, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Multiple other reports have estimated that the overall death toll may exceed 30,000.
As in past years, executions remain one of the starkest manifestations of human rights abuses in Iran, with at least 2,488 people executed last year, including 63 women and two children, 13 of them carried out publicly.
Tehran’s latest controversial move comes as Iran has reportedly slammed a US proposal to end the war as “one‑sided and unfair,” a rebuff that has cast doubt on the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire.
US President Donald Trump has warned the Islamist regime it must reach a deal or face a continued onslaught.
“They now have the chance, that is Iran, to permanently abandon their nuclear ambitions and to join a new path forward,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
“We’ll see if they want to do it. If they don’t, we’re their worst nightmare. In the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away.”