A West Philadelphia magnet school teacher who spent years posing as a Black woman of Palestinian descent confessed the identity was a fabrication, and the activist groups that elevated her have now cut ties.
A Philadelphia public school teacher who spent years presenting herself as a Black woman of Palestinian descent has admitted the identity was a fabrication. Hannah Gann, an educator at the Workshop School in West Philadelphia, confessed in a series of social media posts that she invented her heritage and misled the activist circles that had elevated her as a leading local voice on Palestinian and racial justice issues.
The admission has scrambled the city's progressive organizing network and produced an unusually public rupture, with two of the groups that worked alongside her announcing they will no longer associate with her. It has also revived a national argument about the incentives that reward claimed victimhood in activism, education and political organizing.
Gann addressed the deception directly in her posts. "I lied about my identity and have been lying for years," she wrote. "I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. 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."
Organizers who confronted her say Gann is a white woman of Jewish heritage who comes from an Israeli settler family. At various points she claimed to be Palestinian, Tunisian and Black, building a public persona that placed her at the front of protests, political education events and teach-ins across the city.
In a long video apology, Gann called her conduct "a sick, deluded distraction" from the causes she had attached herself to under false pretenses. She acknowledged lying to nearly everyone in her life, including her own family, and said she rationalized it by telling herself the deception was acceptable because it involved only her own background.
The Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine confronted Gann last week after conducting an investigation into her background. In a joint statement, the groups said they were "stunned, saddened and angered by this betrayal" and confirmed she is no longer welcome in their work.
"We will no longer work with Hannah, and she will no longer be welcome in any of our organizing protests," the statement read.
The fallout has also dragged in Keziah Ridgeway, a fellow Philadelphia teacher who was disciplined over her own pro-Palestinian activism and later sued the school district. Gann worked alongside Ridgeway for years and publicly defended her during that legal fight. Gann said Ridgeway had no knowledge of the fabrications, and Ridgeway told followers she met Gann in 2018 and only learned the truth this month after other organizers brought her evidence.
"What we saw from her was she was doing the work," Ridgeway said in a video recounting the friendship. "She was speaking up for the Black community. She was speaking up for the Palestinian community, and that is what we took as the important thing."
The story lands in the middle of a broader legal reckoning over antisemitism in American institutions, where campus antisemitism lawsuits have forced universities to defend their conduct and their leadership in court.
Gann's admission immediately drew comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the white civil rights instructor who posed as a Black woman for years and served as president of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, until she was exposed in 2015. That case became a defining example of a claimed identity surviving on nothing more than the reluctance of sympathetic institutions to ask hard questions.
The same dynamic appears to have played out in Philadelphia. Organizers say Gann's story went unchallenged inside movements that had every incentive to accept a Palestinian and Black woman at the front of their campaigns. It took outside activists, not her allies, to force the issue into the open.
Her activism had already put her at the center of controversy. In February 2024, a mobile billboard parked outside her school displayed a photograph of Gann wearing a keffiyeh and labeled her the city's leading antisemite, an accusation her defenders dismissed at the time as a right-wing smear.
The School District of Philadelphia confirmed it is aware of the posts. Spokesperson Monique Braxton said the district is monitoring social media content "concerning a district employee and her involvement with an outside advocacy organization," and that support is being made available to students and staff at the Workshop School. She declined to comment on personnel matters or the possibility of discipline.
Gann maintains she never endangered the organizations or people she stood with and was not working on behalf of anyone opposed to their causes. "I recognize it's far too late for me to mitigate all the damage I've done, but I'm determined to try to do what I can," she said.
Two questions now hang over the episode. The first is whether the school district disciplines a teacher whose classroom credibility rested on a fabricated biography. The second is whether the organizations that amplified her will examine how a deception of this scale survived for years inside movements that pride themselves on interrogating identity and privilege.
For a Philadelphia activist scene already fractured over the Gaza war and its own internal disputes, the answer will not come quietly.
A West Philadelphia magnet school teacher who spent years posing as a Black woman of Palestinian descent confessed the identity was a fabrication, and the activist groups that elevated her have now cut ties.
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