‘Black Palestinian’ Teacher Booted From Organizing Groups After Being Outed as White Jewish Woman ‘of Significant Privilege and Wealth’

A Philadelphia teacher is apologizing after claiming to be both black and Palestinian while advocating for pro-Palestinian and social justice causes, despite the fact that she is white and Jewish.Following in the footsteps of another race faker, Rachel Dolezal, Hannah Gann backed down after her fellow advocates confronted her during an hour-long closed door meeting last week where they convinced her to reveal the truth.Ms. Gann had been a member of both the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine. Those groups have cut ties with her since she admitted her deception.“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years,” Ms. Gann wrote in a brief Instagram post last week. “I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth.”In a statement, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine said they were “stunned, saddened and angered” to learn Ms. Gann had lied about her background.“We asked her to publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” the statement reads.After the initial admission last week, Ms. Gann posted a 10-minute video of herself expressing “shame and sorrow and regret to the depth of my core.”“I hid the truth or outright lied about my background to everyone in my life,” Ms. Gann said. “I hid my family’s background from everyone in Philly and also hid from the people in my own family what I was doing.”Ms. Gann claimed that the fallout from her being unmasked was causing harm to the causes she backs, presumably including the pro-Palestinian movement.“I simply want people’s justified anger at my actions to be directed where they belong: onto me,” she said.Ms. Gann said she would leave to a future video the explanation of what she was thinking in perpetuating the racial and ethnic charade. But Ms. Gann did say she allowed “half truths and obfuscations to grow into outright lies.”She left comments enabled on her post — with predictable results — but said she would be deleting comments by “Zionists” and “others who are trying to justify supremacist ideologies, imperial terror and genocidal violence based off my actions.”Last December, a Keffiyeh-clad Ms. Gann spoke out at a school board meeting on behalf of a Philadelphia teacher, Kezia Ridgeway, who was disciplined for pro-Palestinian posts on her private social media. In her remarks, Ms. Gann called racism “material violence” akin to a bomb that kills civilians on the battlefield.“We must be judicious when racism is weaponized to distract us from the actual work we owe to our students,” she said, “The baseless attacks on some of Philly’s best black teachers are meant to distract them from their anti-genocide advocacy.”According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, a research document on Ms. Gann prepared by the Philly Palestine Coalition quoted a college classmate of hers saying she had watched Ms. Gann’s morphosis from “a self-proclaimed white Jewish woman with family in the occupied West Bank.” “I watched her sudden transformation after she returned to Philly from the Peace Corps (in Rwanda). She was clearly making herself look darker using makeup and fake tan, and speaking using (African American Vernacular English.)”The research done by the PPC found that contrary to Ms. Gann’s claims she has a Palestinian grandfather, her grandfather was born at Baltimore, the Inquirer reported.On Instagram in January, Ms. Gann also posted some of her favorite books from the previous year, including “Teaching Palestine by Rethinking Schools” and a book written by the father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani that examined the Rwandan genocide through “an anti-colonial and regional lens.”In August 2023, Ms. Gann posted her thoughts on restorative justice. “To me, high expectations for all our children and restorative practices go hand in hand,” she said in an Instagram video.Ms. Gann teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, according to the Inquirer.

‘Black Palestinian’ Teacher Booted From Organizing Groups After Being Outed as White Jewish Woman ‘of Significant Privilege and Wealth’

‘Black Palestinian’ Teacher Booted From Organizing Groups After Being Outed as White Jewish Woman ‘of Significant Privilege and Wealth’

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