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 NPR Illinois A new book looks at the history of China’s development and the important role played by two Jewish families with massive business empires. Here & Now’s Robin Young speaks with Jonathan Kaufman, author of “The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China.” He is also director of the journalism school at Northeastern University. More Here...

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 The Wall Street Journal For more than a century, the fortunes of the powerful Kadoorie family have been a barometer of Chinese openness to the world. Michael Kadoorie (second from left) with David Li, CEO of the Bank of East Asia (fourth from left), and other guests at the opening of the Peninsula Shanghai Hotel in 2010. Alamy Since 1880, when an Iraqi Jewish refugee named Elly Kadoorie arrived in Hong Kong, China has gone through a series of revolutions—from domination

From The Boston Globe Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe, a reporter who was on the ground weighs the fallout. Presidential candidate Vaclav Havel waves to his supporters from a balcony in Prague in December 1989.REUTERS On a chilly November evening in the fall of 1989, I stood on a busy street in Prague and wondered if spring would return. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1968, the “Prague Spring” had brought students and workers