[1] His interest in American Jewish authors began when Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978.
Upon his return to Nanjing, he discovered that he got a larger audience when he lectured about his three weeks in Israel than when he talked about his two-year stay in the United States.
Seeing the need to disseminate information about Israel and Jewish culture, Xu engaged scholars to work on an abridged Chinese translation of the Encyclopedia Judaica, which he edited.
[4] The publisher wanted a $10,000 subsidy for the work, which was raised by donations in the U.S.[citation needed] The book sold out upon publication and a second edition was printed.
He also launched 12 Nanjing testimonies at the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.
He has led numerous Jewish heritage tours from the US, Israel, the Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and France to Jewish sites in China including Kaifeng (with its biblical history), Harbin (where Jews fled the Russian pogroms at the turn of the 20th century) and Shanghai (where Jews fled the Nazi Holocaust).
In addition, he has run three-week summer seminars for Chinese scholars and graduate students from departments of history and western civilization at other universities to enable them to incorporate material on Judaism into their current classes.
In 2002, Bar-Ilan University's Board of Trustees and the Senate of Israel awarded him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Honoris Causa in recognition of the important research he has done on Jewish people in China.