A woke anti-Israel teacher and activist who claimed to be part black and Arab has been dubbed the “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal” after she was outed as being a white, Jewish woman who hid her privileged identity as she led antisemitic protests.
Hannah Gann, a Philadelphia teacher, was forced to confess she was a “white woman of significant privilege and wealth” after fellow lefty activists grew suspicious of her background and confronted her.
“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years. I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage,” she wrote in a self-aggrandizing apology on Instagram.
“I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth. Anyone who supported me was manipulated and should not be judged as a result of their support for me,” she continued.
A staunch figure in far-left activist circles in Philly, Gann portrayed herself as a mixed-race woman with black and Palestinian heritage. In reality, she is white and Israeli, according to friends.
Gann has been a ringleader for anti-Israel protests based in the Philadelphia public schools, according to a local watchdog group, who branded “Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite” on a mobile billboard parked outside the school where she worked.
One of Gann’s former classmates at the University of Pennsylvania said she was known in college as “a self-proclaimed white Jewish woman with family in the occupied West Bank,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“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 classmate said.
In one video from December 2025, the activist teacher wears a keffiyeh and has a “blaccent,” which she did not use in per apology post this week.
The LARPing activist frequently referenced family in Palestine, including a grandfather who was revealed to have been born in Baltimore, the Inquirer reported, citing a document compiled by the Philly Palestine Coalition (PPC).
The PPC said that as “a teacher of predominately black youth, [Gann] has gained the trust of young people on the basis of a sense of shared oppression. She has served as a mentor to at least one young white person, who was manipulated by Hannah on the basis of a fake identity.
“Her access to vulnerable young people, especially black youth, is deeply concerning, given her pattern of lying and manipulation,” the PPC added.
She also successfully solicited money by claiming she was broke because of sending cash to her relatives in Palestine, according to the PPC. In reality, much of her family still lives in Israel, according to the Inquirer.
She also grew up in remarkable privilege. Her father is a noted tax lawyer who previously worked for the Treasury Department and her $1.8 million family home is in Falls Church, Virginia — the second wealthiest suburb in the nation.
Gann also appeared to bolster claims about her race with subtle disguises – critics accused her of wearing bronzer and other makeup to appear darker, along with donning golden hoop earrings and clawed acrylic fingernails.
Gann also spoke with what stunned critics called a “blaccent” which was audible across her numerous preachy Instagram videos where she lectured about racism and imperialism, all from her supposedly personal experience.
But those affectations were gone in her apology video – no accents and no black lingo to be heard. Her hoop earrings, however remained.
And a listen back at her old videos after the truth was exposed seemed to make her fraud obvious, as she appeared to weave in and out of her affected accent — sometimes sentence by sentence.
The race-faker was outed after a showdown with members of two local activist groups — the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine.
“Members met with Hannah and questioned her about her background on Thursday and after an hour of discussion, Hannah finally admitted she lied,” the groups told the Inquirer.
“We asked her to publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” the organizations said, adding that they were “stunned, saddened and angered by this betrayal.”
Gann, who was listed in materials for a 2024 West Philly “teach-in” on “scholasticide” in Gaza as a Palestinian-American, also stunningly admitted that she even hid her pro-Palestinian activism from her family in order to keep living the lie.
“I hid the truth or outright lied about my background to everyone in my life,” she said, adding that the deception included her own family.
Gann arrogantly confessed she “allowed half-truths and obfuscations to grow into outright lies” because she “genuinely wanted to commit to the work I was doing.”
Her bizarre story saw her dubbed the “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal” by shocked community members, in reference to the notorious former NAACP president who masqueraded as a black woman despite being white.
And while Gann’s position was not nearly as prominent as Dolezal’s, it was shocking nevertheless in her West Philadelphia community – where she was such a prominent anti-Israel voice that her activism was documented by multiple antisemitism watchdog groups.
A box truck drove around her neighborhood in 2024 calling her: “Hannah Gann: 10th grade teacher and Philadelphia’s leading antisemite” – and it was paired with a photo of her screaming at a 2023 anti-Israel rally.
That rally was dubbed “pro-Hamas” by another antisemitism awareness group, Canary Mission, which posted footage of Gann helping lead the rally just weeks after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in their Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“I know every martyr’s life is precious,” Gann said the rally, evoking the term Hamas uses to describe its dead killers.
“When a Palestinian child picks of a rock or a slingshot in the face of Israeli tanks or machine guns, we owe them that same energy,” she screamed to a cheering crowd. “We owe them to take it to these streets and f–k the police until Palestine is free.”
That rally was held outside a Jewish bakery.
Other alarming acts included Gann saying a Jewish teacher — who complained about classroom banners calling for Israel’s destruction — was “lying and playing the victim,” along with her joking about firebombing Jewish-owned business.
Gann, who teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, also defended Keziah Ridgeway, a fellow Philadelphia teacher the school district disciplined for private, pro-Palestinian social media posts.
In a since-deleted post, Gann said that she had stolen “resources from CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] and other movement orgs. I am so sorry for all the harm I have caused.”
The fraudster appeared shocked when confronted by The Post at her home, as she acknowledged “the harm” she had caused.
Of the deleted post, she claimed, “someone else asked me to post that. That’s why I took it down.”
A classmate of Gann’s from the University of Pennsylvania didn’t remember her pretending to be black ever or being involved in any black cultural groups during their college days – but said they were appalled to learn what she’d been up to since then.
“I can’t speak to her motivation. But it seems like she just tried to take advantage of vulnerable communities because she got involved and couldn’t fully engage in the ways that she wanted based on her identity,” the classmate said.
“If you truly care about the cause more so than about personal gain, then that’s just what it is,” they added.
It isn’t clear what disciplinary measures, if any, Gann will face from her employer.
A spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia told The Post it was “aware of social media posts concerning a District employee and her involvement with an outside advocacy organization.
“These posts reference the employee’s involvement in an external group. The District is making support available to The Workshop School staff and students, as needed,” the spokesperson continued.
— With additional reporting by Reuven Fenton.
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