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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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Are you a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? Or a Jewitch?
When I was a little girl, I played Witch all the time. I was The Grande Madame — the Queen of all the Witches. I even wrote spooky musicals for the neighborhood kids. We set up lawn chairs in my friend Susie’s backyard in Queens, and made our parents watch. If I had been more business minded, I would have sold tickets.
Now I teach music and something must have stayed with me, because October is my favorite month — Witchy Music Month. This week, I put on my pointy hat, plugged in my spooky orange lights, and played some scenes from The Wizard of Oz and Snow White for the kiddos.
Then I noticed something.
Both witches had big, hooked noses. What they used to call “Jewish Noses.” The noses that kept New York surgeons busy when we hit 18. Many of us got nose jobs. It wasn’t a secret. It was expected.
My mother said no, so I couldn’t get one, but it didn’t stop me from kvetching. (I also asked to be sent to a Swiss Finishing School — again, no.)
I looked it up. A big study in 1914 debunked the theory that Jews actually had big noses — 14% aquiline, compared with 10% of the regular population. Considering that Jews are a people sometimes “bottlenecked from geographic diversity” in a more modern study in 2022, meaning that we weren’t allowed to live anywhere we wanted, and definitely meaning that we inbred, it doesn’t sound like we owned Big Nose.
Tell everybody.
Still, the “hook-nosed” Jewish stereotype remains. Hard to get rid of stereotypes, and harder to get rid of what most people find conventionally attractive. Especially when Disney adds to the Big Hooked Nose in Snow White’s witch — with some well-placed warts.
The most famous Jewish Witch story was when King Saul wanted to go to battle with the Philistines and consulted the Witch of Endor. She summoned Prophet Samuel’s Spirit for the King. Alas Samuel prophesied Doom, and King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed the next day.
The irony was that King Saul had banned all witches, until he needed one himself.
And do you remember what TV writer Sol Sacks named Samantha’s mother in the TV series, Bewitched? Yes, Endora. I bet Sacks’ Hebrew School teacher was proud.
My son, Aaron, is most like me, and I guess most susceptible to my witchiness. He really believed when he was little, and I remember once picking him up from his second grade class. As I bent down to tie Aaron’s shoe, I felt 100 little eyes on me. When I straightened up, I was surrounded by a solemn crowd. A little girl pointed and said, “Aaron, she doesn’t look like a witch.”
I have to admit, I was a little insulted.
I also have to admit that I did use my powers on Aaron and I am a little ashamed. When he was six, he hated Shabbos because of its restrictions. No TV, no piano, no trips in the car to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees; and endless synagogue.
But this happened on a Wednesday night. He was in a mood and was smashing all her plastic swords and yelling, and I was on the phone trying to accept a music gig with a bride and groom. I told the couple I’d call them right back.
“Aaron,” I looked at him. “If you don’t stop right now — I’m gonna make it SHABBOS!”
He dropped his swords in petrified horror. “C-c-can you really DO that?”
And then I did something I’m even more ashamed of. I smiled.
The post Are you a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? Or a Jewitch? appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey-Qatar Partnership Grows While Hamas Refuses to Disarm, Raising Alarm Bells Over Gaza’s Future
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is welcomed by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha, Qatar, Oct. 22, 2025. Photo: Murat Kula/Turkish Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS
As Qatar and Turkey further expand their relationship, concerns are mounting that their growing influence in Gaza could bolster Hamas and complicate the fragile ceasefire, as both countries pursue their regional ambitions in the war-torn enclave.
On Wednesday, Ankara and Doha signed new agreements on defense, trade, and strategic planning, deepening a partnership that continues to raise alarm bells among Israel, Gulf states, and experts, who warn that their expanding roles in Gaza’s reconstruction efforts could potentially strengthen Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.
As part of his three-day Gulf tour, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to Doha to meet with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
During the 11th meeting of the Turkey–Qatar High Strategic Committee, the two leaders issued a joint declaration reaffirming their commitment to maintaining the US-backed Gaza peace plan.
Erdogan’s diplomatic visit came a day after Hamas leaders met with Qatari and Turkish officials in Doha to discuss the ongoing Israel-Hamas ceasefire and plans for rebuilding Gaza after the war.
As both nations expanded their relationship with new cooperation agreements, Turkey has reportedly sought to acquire billions of dollars’ worth of military technology from Qatar, including 24 used and 16 new Eurofighter Typhoon jets.
If approved, the deal would allow Doha to provide Ankara with an immediate solution to its operational gap, bypassing the Eurofighter production schedule, which is currently overbooked due to high global demand.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions, Turkey’s move to acquire advanced multi-role combat aircraft would strengthen its position as a key regional power and reduce reliance on American-made systems, while representing a major step in modernizing its combat aviation fleet.
However, concerns over Qatar and Turkey’s expanding partnership come at a time when the fragile Gaza ceasefire, though seemingly holding, faces mounting challenges, as the Palestinian terrorist group continues to refuse disarmament — an essential component of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.
On Saturday, Hamas reiterated the group’s refusal to give up its weapons as part of the ceasefire.
“The proposed weapons handover is out of the question and not negotiable,” a Hamas official told AFP.
Hamas Politburo member Mohammed Nazzal also said the group could not commit to disarmament, as it intends to maintain security control in Gaza during an interim period.
Even though Hamas has publicly expressed these views before, these latest remarks have heightened concerns over obstacles to ending the war in Gaza, with the next phase of ceasefire negotiations waiting to begin.
In this regional context, experts warn that both Turkey and Qatar — as two of the largest state sponsors of Hamas, with long-standing ties to the terrorist group — could shield the Islamist movement in Gaza or even bolster its terror infrastructure, as they seek a central role in post-war efforts.
Alongside the United States and regional powers, Qatar has served as a ceasefire mediator during the two-year conflict in Gaza, facilitating indirect negotiations between the Jewish state and Hamas, which has ruled the enclave for nearly two decades.
However, Doha has also backed the Palestinian terrorist group for years, providing Hamas with money and diplomatic support while hosting and sheltering its top leadership.
Turkey has also been a major international backer of Hamas and has maintained an openly hostile stance toward the Jewish state for years.
During his visit to Doha, Erdogan said the ceasefire “has provided relief to Palestinians,” but reiterated that a two-state solution was the only path to resolving the conflict with Israel.
Under Trump’s plan, Turkey is expected to join a multinational task force responsible for overseeing the ceasefire and training local security forces.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at opposition to any involvement of Turkish security forces in post-war Gaza.
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Major Body of University Professors Targets Antisemitism Prevention Policies at University of Pennsylvania
Anti-Israel encampment at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, USA in May 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens via Reuters Connect
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the largest and oldest US organization for defending faculty rights, is picking a fight over the University of Pennsylvania’s efforts to combat antisemitism, arguing that a range of faculty speech and conduct considered hostile by Jewish members of the campus community are key components of academic freedom.
In a letter to the administration regarding antidiscrimination investigations opened by Penn’s Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests (OREI), the group charged that efforts to investigate alleged antisemitism on campus and punish those found to have perpetrated can constitute discrimination. Its argument reprises recent claims advanced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) group, notorious for its defense of Sharia law and alleged ties to jihadist groups such as Hamas, in a lawsuit which aims to dismantle antisemitism prevention training at Northwestern University.
“Harassing, surveilling, intimidating, and punishing members of the university community for research, teaching, and extramural speech based on overly broad definitions of antisemitism does nothing to combat antisemitism, but it can perpetuate anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism, muzzle political criticism of the Israeli government by people of any background, and create a climate of fear and self-censorship that threatens the academic freedom of all faculty and students,” the AAUP said, threatening to scrutinize the university. “AAUP-Penn will continue to monitor reports related to OREI.”
Additionally, the AAUP described Penn’s efforts to protect Jewish students from antisemitism as resulting from “government interference in university procedures” while arguing that merely reporting antisemitism subjects the accused to harassment, seemingly suggesting that many Jewish students who have been assaulted, academically penalized, and exposed to hate speech on college campuses across the US are perpetrators rather than victims. The group also argued that other minority groups from “protected classes,” such as Arabs and African Americans, are disproportionately investigated for antisemitism.
Despite the AAUP’s claims, some University of Pennsylvania faculty have played an outsized role in organizing antisemitic activities on campus, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In 2023, professor Huda Fakhreddine helped organize the “Palestine Writes Festival,” a gathering of anti-Zionists which featured Gaza-based professor Refaat Alareer, who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are,” and Salman Abu Sitta, who once said in an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.” Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, was also initially scheduled as a speaker, despite a documentary exposing his long record of anti-Jewish barbs. In one instance, a former colleague recalled Waters at a restaurant yelling at the wait staff to “take away the Jew food.”
That event prompted a deluge of antisemitic incidents at the University of Pennsylvania, including Nazi graffiti and a student’s trailing a staffer into the university’s Hillel building and shouting “F–k the Jews” and “Jesus Christ is king!” overturning tables, podium stands, and chairs. Fakhreddine, who days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel attended an on-campus rally in which a speaker castigated what he called “the Israeli Jew,” later sued Congress to halt its investigation of campus antisemitism at Penn.
The professor’s civil complaint brimmed with classic antisemitic tropes, describing efforts to eradicate antisemitism as a conspiracy by “billionaire donors, pro-Israel groups, other litigants, and segments of the media” to squelch criticism of Israel and harm Arab students and academics. It also disparaged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, calling it a tool of a “militant minority which believes that Israel can do no wrong” and alleging that it is “unconstitutional” and the bedrock of a larger plan of a “social engineering movement” to abolish the First Amendment of the US Constitution. A federal judge ultimately threw the case out of court.
The following year, the University Pennsylvania pledged in a report on antisemitism that it would never again confer academic legitimacy to antisemitism and formally denounced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as “discriminatory” and “anti-intellectual.” The university also passed other policies aimed at protecting academic freedom and free speech from attempts to invoke them as justification for uttering hate speech and founded the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, which the AAUP is now accusing of breaking the law.
The AAUP has defended antisemitic speech before.
In 2014, it accused the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of violating the tenets of academic freedom when it declined to approve the hiring of Steven Salaita because he uttered a slew of antisemitic, extramural comments on social media, such as “Zionists transforming ‘antisemitism from something horrible into something honorable since 1948,” “Every Jewish boy and girl can grow up to be the leader of a murderous colonial regime,” and “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic s—t in response to Israeli terror.”
An AAUP report that chronicled the incident, which mushroomed into a major controversy in academia, listed those tweets and others but still concluded that not hiring Salaita “acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” and “cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected.” At the same time, the AAUP said that it was “committed to fighting systemic racism and pursuing racial justice and equity in colleges and universities, in keeping with the association’s mission to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”
Other actions have moved the AAUP further into the world of left-wing anti-Zionism, tarnishing its image as a bipartisan guardian of scholarship and inquiry.
Following Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, two and a half weeks passed before the AAUP commented on the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and when it did, the group said nothing about the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities, instead discussing the importance of academic freedom. At the time, many professors cheered Hamas’s violence and encouraged extreme anti-Zionist demonstrations in which masses of students and faculty called for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” which is widely interpreted as a call for genocide.
In August 2024, the AAUP issued a statement in support of academic boycotts, a seismic decision which reversed decades of policy and cleared the way for scholar activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.
Coming amid a bitter debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses and Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, the statement did not mention the Jewish state specifically, but its countenancing the anti-Israel BDS movement was made clear, according to Jewish and pro-Israel leaders, by a section of the statement which said that boycotts “can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”
In March, the AAUP held a webinar which promoted false claims about Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.
Titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” the virtual event accused Israel of “scholasticide” and “exterminationist” tactics of war. Such accusations cite damages sustained by education institutions and loss of life in Gaza, but rather than describing those misfortunes as inevitable consequences of a protracted war that Hamas started by launching the surprise Oct. 7 massacre, those leading the AAUP event argued that Israel’s aim was to murder educators and erase Palestinian history and culture.
“We are very concerned that AAUP, whose stated mission includes representing all academics and ensuring ‘higher education’s contribution to the common good’ continues to act in ways that demonize Israel, marginalize Jewish and Israeli members, and promote policies and events that portray a one-sided, politicized view of complex issues,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.