The activist outed for being white and Jewish after masquerading as a black Palestinian anti-Israel zealot was once dubbed “Philadelphia’s leading antisemite” by a watchdog group — after she shouted vitriol outside a Jewish bakery in what groups called a “pro-Hamas rally.”
“Hannah Gann: 10th grade teacher and Philadelphia’s leading antisemite” read a billboard plastered across a box truck that Accuracy in Media drove around Gann’s West Philadelphia neighborhood in 2024.
“We’re driving around town, making sure her neighbors know,” the group wrote in an X post at the time, including a photo of the truck parked outside the high school were Gann teaches.
The truck was rolled out weeks after Gann stood outside a Jewish bakery and helped lead an anti-Israel protest, which the antisemitism watchdog group Canary Mission described as a “pro-Hamas” rally.
“I know every martyr’s life is precious,” Gann said at the rally, held just two months after Hamas terrorists stormed Israel in their bloody Oct. 7 attack, killing more than 1,200 people.
“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,” Gann shouted into a megaphone as crowds cheered back.
“We owe them to take it to these streets and f–k the police until Palestine is free,” she added. “We owe it to resist and disrupt with everything we have.”
Things got awkward this week, however, when 34-year-old Gann was exposed by the Philadelphia Inquirer Tuesday for being everything she professed to despite — white, Jewish, and the daughter of wealthy Virgina parents who now live in Israel.
But she spent years masquerading as part black, part-Tunisian and Palestinian, a false-identity she assumed to ingrain herself in Philadelphia’s anti-Israel movement.
Gann went so far as to wear make-up to maker her complexion look darker, and affected accents to play the part in a scam widely compared to Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP president who pretended to be black before being exposed as completely white.
“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years,” Gann confessed in a long-winded apology. “I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage.”
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But her true identity did nothing to stop Gann’s hatred of her parents’ home and her own people — her presence at the bakery rally was just one moment in alarming comments.
“The way folks just be lying and playing the victim really needs to be studied,” she wrote in one social media post, referring to a Jewish teacher who complained about “From the river to the sea” signs — widely understood to call for the destruction of Israel — hung in her school, according to Canary Mission
And in 2024 Gann shared a photo of a burning McDonald’s, captioned with “Inspiring me to start a 2024 vision board” and a link to a website cataloguing Jewish-owned businesses, the Tennessee Star reported.
