Hannah Gann teaches history in a public school in west Philadelphia. People say that America’s schools no longer produce winners, but a local group once parked a van outside Gann’s school with a billboard reading “Hannah Gann: 10th Grade Teacher and Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite”.
Gann’s identity as a mixed-race woman of Palestinian and Afro-Tunisian heritage was central to her activism.
In December 2023, she was one of the speakers at a Philly Palestinian Coalition demo whose name, “Flood Philly for Gaza”, echoed that of Hamas’s name for the October 7 massacres – Al-Aqsa Flood.
“When a Palestinian child picks up a rock or a slingshot in the face of Israeli tanks or machine guns, we owe them that same energy!” Gann told the crowd. “We owe them to take it to these streets and f*** the police until Palestine is free!”
Some of the mob took that same energy and went off to harass Goldie, an Israeli-owned falafel restaurant.
Canary Mission, which documents anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement, reports that Gann endorsed Hamas “resistance” in Instagram posts, called Israel a “terrorist organisation” and claimed that “the displacement of Black and Brown people” by gentrification in Philadelphia “stems from the same violent institutions that are perpetrating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.
In 2023 and 2024, Gann organised multiple “teach-ins” in Philadelphia schools on Israeli “scholasticide” and “genocide” in Gaza.
In December 2024, the Department of Education, using Donald Trump’s first-term expansion of the Civil Rights Act to cover Jews, judged that the Philadelphia School District had failed its legal duty to ensure the civil rights of its Jewish pupils. Its schools had become a “hostile environment”.
In 2025, the US House of Representatives launched an inquiry about discrimination against Jews in Philly schools by both staff and pupils.
On September 29, Pennsylvania House Republicans called on the state’s attorney general to investigate the School District as a “breeding ground for antisemitism”.
Guess what? Hannah Gann isn’t Palestinian and Afro-Tunisian. Gann is Jewish.
Her father Hal is a wealthy tax lawyer who worked for the Treasury Department. Her mother Susan is a Democratic Party donor. Her family home is in Falls Church, Virginia, America’s second-wealthiest suburb.
Gann attended University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college. At U Penn, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, Gann was known as a white Jew with family living in a West Bank settlement.
A classmate said that Gann went to Rwanda with the Peace Corps and came back “using makeup and fake tan”. For her diatribes against Israel and America, she affected a “blaccent”, big hoop earrings and clawed acrylic nail extensions.
This is an old American story. Gann’s political transformation resembles that of “Swede” Levov’s daughter in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral: Merry Levov is radicalised and alienated by the elite education that her parents trusted as a marker of American success and integration.
“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years,” Gann confessed on Instagram on September 18 after her fellow activists tumbled her imposture. “I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth.”
This is also a new American story. Gann went “trans”. Like Rachel Dolezal, the radical college instructor who predicated her racial politics on her fake black identity but turned out to be of European ancestry, Gann was “trans-race”.
That’s an old American story too. It used to be called “race-crossing”. Roth also wrote a novel about that, The Human Stain. But previously, the traffic was in the other direction.
In the bad old days, social, professional and legal incentives pushed non-white or mixed-race Americans, and Jews too, to surmount the colour bar and the quota by “passing” as white or Christian.
“I had given up the violin and left St. Louis/ I had given up being Jewish,” Frederick Seidel wrote in Sunrise, “To be at Harvard just another/ Greek nose in street clothes in/ Harvard Yard.”
Gann’s fraud reflects how the incentives have reversed. Today’s social and professional incentives push white and Jewish Americans to pass as theoretically oppressed minorities and prove it by performing extremist politics.
Rachel Dolezal now calls herself Nkechi Diallo and works as a sex coach and Only Fans model. She wants Gann to tell her how it happened: “Girl, tell me your story.”
Gann has yet to tell it fully. In an Instagram struggle session, she confessed her “shame and sorrow and regret” about deceiving her family and her activist friends, and said that any blame belonged “directly and solely” with her.
She didn’t admit that she was Jewish. Instead of explaining what happened, she denounced “Zionists” and “supremacist ideology and genocidal terror”. She accused Israel of “targeting journalists for extermination”.
Gann insists that she truly believed in the causes she promoted and still believes in “collective liberation” from Zionism and capitalism. But the rules of identity politics are now against her. As she admitted, “no one has any reason to listen to me now”.
She wants to “earn a spot in the struggle again” by denouncing herself. She doesn’t seem to understand that her erstwhile friends want to collectively liberate themselves from people like her.
Gann’s confession makes painful viewing. She admits what she is not, but not what she is. This suggests that she cannot yet admit the truth.
Her anti-Americanism was self-loathing and conformist. Her fake accent and fashion were cartoons of patronising racial stereotypes.
Her “anti-Israel” activism was anti-Jewish bigotry and conspiracism. Its patina of academic and “pro-Palestinian” talk was about as deep as her bronzer.
It’s especially painful to watch because it’s too easy to see how Gann’s anti-Jewish environments at U Penn, and especially in her workplace, pushed her to falsify herself in the service of crank leftist and Islamists.
As Dolezal shows, F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong to say there were “no second acts in American lives”.
Hannah Gann will be back. The identity incentives push her to a second act as an antizionist “as-a-Jew”.
Many such cases.
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