
Hannah Gann wore African print clothing and large earrings. She spoke in African American Vernacular English. She told people she was Black. Then Palestinian. Then Tunisian. Then Lebanese. She co-founded activist groups, mentored students, and positioned herself as a leading voice for racial justice in Philadelphia's education community.
She's a white Jewish woman with relatives she herself identified as Israeli settlers.
Gann wasn't a peripheral figure who inflated her background on a résumé. She co-founded Philly Educators for Palestine in early 2024 after organizing a "teach-in" about Palestinian history and the Gaza conflict. She held a leadership role in the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, an independent group established in 2020. Both organizations built their credibility on Gann's claimed identity. Both are now effectively finished.
Philly Educators for Palestine announced it has dissolved entirely. "After much reflection," the group stated, it "has made the decision to dissolve." The Racial Justice Organizing Committee said it's taking a "two-month hiatus to rest, process, and decompress" and will decide whether to continue by the end of the year. Neither group was affiliated with the Philadelphia School District, but their members taught there, and Gann herself still teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based district high school.
The district declined to comment on personnel matters but said it was providing support.
One anonymous organizer who worked closely with Gann put it plainly: "The emotional labor that she has utilized from me is so unbelievable — I can never get that time back." Keziah Ridgeway, a teacher Gann had publicly defended, said she could "no longer be in community with someone who caused so much harm."
Gann released a 10-minute video acknowledging the deception and posted a social media apology. Ten minutes. Years of cosplaying as a minority activist, building organizations around a fabricated identity, cultivating trust with students — some of whom stayed at her house — and the reckoning gets a video shorter than a TED talk.
The Rachel Dolezal comparisons write themselves, but Gann managed something Dolezal never did: she built entire institutional structures around the lie. Dolezal ran an existing NAACP chapter. Gann co-founded organizations from scratch, which means the deception wasn't incidental to the mission — it was the foundation. When the foundation turned out to be fake, the buildings collapsed.
What makes this particular implosion instructive is what it reveals about the machinery of identity politics. Gann didn't just claim to be something she wasn't. According to people who knew her, she "acted extra Black, like cosplaying Black" — adopting mannerisms, speech patterns, and cultural markers as a costume. She deliberately befriended activists to gain trust. She glossed over her University of Pennsylvania education when it didn't fit the narrative. Every interaction was a performance calibrated to extract credibility from communities she had no connection to.
Jason Holtzman, chief of the Jewish Community Relations Council, noted that the communities Gann misrepresented "deserve honesty and respect." That's diplomatic. What they deserved was not to have their identities worn as costumes by someone leveraging them for social capital in Philadelphia's activist scene.


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