Reviews

From LA Review of Books AS A SHANGHAI-BORN WRITER, when I was invited to review journalist Jonathan Kaufman’s new biographically driven history of the city’s pre-1949 era, I readily agreed. One reason was its title, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China, which led me to assume, correctly, that it would deal in part with the Sassoon family. I knew the Sassoon name from a book series I read in my childhood titled Shanghai Stories

From Jewish Book Council If a Jew­ish his­to­ri­an were to advance a claim for the diver­si­ty of the expe­ri­ence of the dias­po­ra, the case would rest with the saga of the Sas­soons and the Kadoories. Once based in Bagh­dad, these two clans (and, yes, they were dis­tant­ly relat­ed) relo­cat­ed to Chi­na in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Instead of the mate­r­i­al strug­gles that, until the last cen­tu­ry, marked the mil­len­nia of exile for near­ly all of Jew­ry, these tw

From The Wall Street Journal Shanghai in the 1920s and ’30s was one of the world’s most modern, vibrant cities. And the city’s richest man was Victor Sassoon, a Jazz Age Richard Branson who gave costume parties in the ballroom of his swanky Cathay Hotel. Another local tycoon, Elly Kadoorie, built himself a palace modeled on Versailles, and his family moved around in a fleet of Rolls-Royces. The opulence of the Sassoons and Kadoories is all the more remarkable considering the

From Asian Review of Books Chinese often claim a special relationship, sometimes verging on kinship, with Jews. The origins and reasons remain unclear but it may be at least in part due to two Jewish families—the Sassoons and their rivals, the Kadoories—both of whom played lasting roles in the development of two of China’s most modern cities: Shanghai and its rival, Hong Kong. Jonathan Kaufman’s new book, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Crea

From The Boston Globe Jonathan Kaufman's book almost certainly will revive interest in a much-forgotten wrinkle of Jewish and Chinese history. More Here...

From Kirkus Reviews Historical account of two significant Jewish families who built wildly prosperous financial empires in Shanghai and Hong Kong that lasted for nearly two centuries. From opium trading to banking to real estate, the Sassoon and Kadoorie families “helped open the world to China—and opened China to the world.” As Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Kaufman notes, they were “taipans,” alternately revered, feared, and loathed by the Chinese, who have largely “obscur

From Library Journal Kaufman (journalism, Northwesten Univ.; A Hole in the Heart of the World) unearths a hidden history with ties to the current global market in this account of the investments of two Jewish families who form an unexpected foundation for modern-day China. Both the Kadoorie and Sassoon families fled persecution in Iraq, escaping to China. Elias Sassoon arrived in Shanghai in 1850, trading opium. Elly Kadoorie settled in Hong Kong in 1880, as a Sassoon employe

From Commentary A great deal has been written on black-Jewish relations, but, perhaps surprisingly, we still do not have a really good history of the topic. It seems that for historians the better part of wisdom has been either to let this emotion-laden story alone or to engage it in carefully controlled images, of which the most common has been that of two minorities both of whom have suffered tragically at the hands of dominant authority and hence have joined together in a

From The Washington Post BROKEN ALLIANCE The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America By Jonathan Kaufman Scribner's. 311 pp. $19.95 THE NAME-CALLING between blacks and Jews in America has reached a climax. Following such recent excesses as former Chicago mayoral aide Steve Cokely's attack on Jews for spreading AIDs among black children, New York Mayor Ed Koch's statement that Jews would be "crazy" to vote for Jesse Jackson, and an L.A. public relations firm's call

From The New York Times BROKEN ALLIANCE The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America. By Jonathan Kaufman. 311 pp. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $19.95. That blacks and Jews in America differ on many issues does not, in itself, seem very remarkable; what is remarkable is the importance that these differences are given and the way they are used by each group to goad the other. In Mayor Koch's attacks on Jesse Jackson in this year's New York Presidential primary,