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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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AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’
In the mid-2010s, journalist Aaron Bastani coined the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” arguing that automation, AI, and synthetic biology would eventually make work and material scarcity essentially obsolete. Eventually this idea became a manifesto envisioning a post-scarcity, post-capitalist world.
The Internet took notice, and by the summer of 2015, Bastani’s earnest manifesto had spawned millions of trollish variations (including my personal favorite, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” — the ‘gay’ and ‘space’ parts pointing to different ways to deal with overpopulation on Earth). As such things usually are, the memes were half-joking, half-serious, pointing both to a utopian vision of the future and to the impossibility of ever achieving it.
Eleven years later, though, the utopia may be at hand — though, as we’ve all heard by now, it could be more of a dystopia.
We’ve all read the takes: AI is taking our jobs, data centers are polluting the heartland, and, oh yeah, there’s a 10% chance that rogue AI agents will wipe out life on Earth. Of these three very different risks, Mira Fox recently wrote about the third from a Jewish perspective, and many pundits have commented on the second. I want to focus on the first one — on what happens to society when the value and availability of work changes so radically,and on how Jewish traditions may end up being of value.
On, in other words, Fully Automated Luxury Jewish Communism.
Let’s start in the present, when, as AI boosters are fond of saying, LLMs are the least-capable that they will ever be, yet have already radically altered the fields in which my husband and I both work. Jobs are already disappearing and highly qualified “white collar” workers are finding it harder and harder to get new ones. I’d guess that 90% of the work I did as a young lawyer could be done by 2026-level LLMs, with review by a senior attorney. And that’s today.
It is, at best, extremely unclear how our society is supposed to cope with the economic and social-spiritual-psychological consequences of this.
Economically, most AI-boosters say we’ll need some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support all those laid-off actuaries, coders, call center operators, researchers, and technical writers. Never mind that many of these same AI boosters are libertarians opposed to the state doing anything at all, and that many others are contributing mightily to Republican politicians who are opposed even to raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare coverage. These are the politicians who will usher in UBI socialism for all?
But the question is deeper than economics. When the work you do is done by a machine, who are you?
After all, work isn’t just about putting food on the table; our identities are often tied to our jobs, and, more generally, to our capacity to provide for ourselves and our families. (For traditionalists, much of this is still gendered — men do the providing — but not for most progressives.) Even if our material needs are somehow met by UBI and the explosion in productivity that AI is supposed to bring about, what about our non-material needs: our need for purpose, meaning and identity?
Lest this sound vague or ‘soft,’ consider that what philosopher Jon Vervaeke has called the ‘Meaning Crisis’ animates much of our contemporary politics today. MAGA populism is, in large part, a response to the erosion (real or perceived) in American conceptions of communal identity, economic opportunity, gender roles, and religion – i.e., the Meaning Crisis. Yes, much of MAGA’s resentment is driven by economics: by the hollowing out of the American middle class in the wake of globalization and other factors. And a lot of it is driven by racism. But much of it is also about meaning: what it means to be an American, to be a man, to be white, to be Christian. And Donald Trump has brilliantly, intuitively channeled the rage at those societal changes into a hopeless, nihilistic patriotism — the Lost Cause for the 21st century.
The point is, “soft” concerns often drive our politics. Sure, it’s the economy, but also what economic dislocation means to people who experience it. And that meaning is as much spiritual, for lack of a better term, as it is financial.
From my vantage point, as a rabbi/journalist/psychedelics scholar/meditation teacher, it seems obvious that we are headed for a collective crisis even more massive than the ones we have already experienced. In a sense, AI is to white-collar work what globalization, de-unionization, and technology was to blue-collar work. Twenty years ago, it was the factories that were closing. Now, it’s the law offices cutting back on hiring. What is supposed to happen next?
From that same vantage point, it seems equally obvious that, as a society, there will need to be significant reorientation toward non-economic forms of value. Of course, these exist already: people find meaning in family, religion, culture, creativity, sports, hobbies, and a thousand other interests. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch. But consider how many people in your life (present company included) also derive meaning from work, and what will happen when that is taken away.
Religion, in its broadest possible sense, will almost certainly grow in response. Already, we’ve seen some of this in conservative quarters — converts to Catholicism like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, for example, or even the broad religiosity of Joe Rogan. But Capital-R Religion’s price of admission may be too high for many people: belief in God, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and all the myths and stories that seem preposterous if taken literally.
But there is also what I’ve called lower-case-r religion: forms of communal, ethical, and spiritual cohesion that are less about God, dogma, and obligation and more about the sacred in everyday life, rituals that bring us together, and practices that help us to grow ethically and spiritually.
In other words, what a lot of liberal Judaism, at its best, is already about.
A majority of non-Orthodox Judaism is already what Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie has called “God-optional” — it may have some general notion of the universe as sacred (I once wrote a book about that), and may maintain traditional God-language in liturgy and text, but it’s not focused on belief in an old man in the sky or obedience to Him for fear of punishment. Rather, as I wrote about in these pages in 2009, it’s focused on what religion does: how it can nourish the soul, teach ethical values, mark the passages of time, and bring people together in communities of meaning.
DZ Kalman, a leading theorist on Judaism and artificial intelligence, told me that “neither Judaism nor any other religion has a ready-to-hand answer for what to do when a chunk of the world’s jobs is suddenly no longer necessary. We have thoughts about the value of work, but those ideas are premised on a world where human labor is necessary to keep society running. We are not yet ready for a ‘time that is wholly Shabbat,’” a metaphor for the messianic age.
Yet, Kalman continued, “Shabbat is fundamental here. Humans can simply be; AI (for the moment) cannot. We as a society are not good at championing the value of presence, which is core to the Shabbat experience.”
But soon, we are going to have to be. Because what is “fully-automated luxury Jewish communism” if not a time that is wholly Shabbat?
What “religion” looks like in its particulars will vary with every person who experiences it. For some, it may mean a recommitment to seemingly non-religious activities: rescuing animals is ‘religious’ in this sense, as is throwing elaborate parties, seeing films, writing poetry, or, of course, raising a family. For others, it may well be the full traditional package, which excels at providing holistic systems of meaning. And for me, it will continue to mean a combination of spiritual practice (meditation, psychedelics, ritual), family life and political activism. Judaism and Jewishness already encompasses all of these things; just peruse the weekly schedule of a mainstream suburban synagogue, and you’ll find most of them already.
Personally, among those various possibilities, I’m interested in whether we’ll see a Jewish ‘archaic revival’ — a term coined by psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna to describe a resurgence in ‘primitive’, non-rational ways of relating to the great mystery of the human condition. I’m excited by that possibility, which will likely be accelerated by psychedelics in particular (if you haven’t yet, please read the ‘Jewish Journeys’ study which showed how psychedelic experience super-charged people’s interest in spirituality). There are plenty of risks as well: Contrary to hippie myths, spirituality does not make one more politically liberal, and often makes people more particularistic. But I’m intrigued by an embodied Judaism newly revitalized to meet the needs of a post-work future.
Of course, that’s only one Jewish path, and not the most popular one. The broader point is that as work recedes in importance and society faces radical and destabilizing changes, we are going to need more and better ways to understand ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Which, for all its shortcomings, Judaism has been exploring for around 3,000 years.
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Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board
(JTA) — A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after passengers reported that an altercation broke out between two pilots. Israeli officials are describing the incident as a terrorist attack and passengers say they intervened to restrain a man who had attacked one of the pilots.
The flight, carrying more than 100 Israeli passengers, was diverted while flying over Jordanian airspace and eventually landed at Tabuk Airport in northern Saudi Arabia, an Israeli official to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
An Israeli official briefed the media and was quoted by Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that one pilot stabbed the other and attempted to “do a 9/11” — either by hijacking the plane and flying it toward Israel or crashing it. The official said that a “dramatic disaster was prevented.”
According to accounts from passengers posted on social media and reports by Israeli media, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. At least two people were injured in the incident. The entire incident lasted about an hour and a half.
“We are on the flight from Dubai. We took control of the flight. There was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots,” passenger Itzhak Liber said in a Facebook video. “A few of us jumped in and pulled him out of the cockpit. Everything is OK now. The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously injured.”
“It was tough. Everything is covered in blood,” Liber added.
Another passenger, appearing in a video posted to social media with blood visible on his face, said the passengers were in the middle of a hijacking and had restrained the attacker as the plane prepared to land. In another video, several passengers said they were protecting the pilot.
A third passenger told Israel’s Channel 12, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end.”
Saudi authorities said the two pilots were taken to a hospital after sustaining injuries, according to international media reports. Flydubai, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, has acknowledged that there was an “incident” that led to the diversion of the flight. It stressed that the plane landed safely and that all passengers were safe. UAE officials had not commented on the incident as of publication.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident. The plane subsequently diverted from its route and landed in Tabuk.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had held consultations and was monitoring developments. “Following concerns over an aviation incident, the prime minister held consultations on the matter and followed developments,” Netanyahu’s office said. “The incident is under control, and all measures are now being taken to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, but the two countries maintain ties. This is not the first time a flight carrying Israeli passengers has landed in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a post on X that there had been an attempt to “crash” the aircraft and “murder 180 Israelis.” He called for Israel to hold accountable the “state or terrorist organization” responsible for the incident.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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