The Bizarre Case of Hannah Gann: the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal

Welcome and happy Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026. Somewhere out there, someone's already three pancakes deep and calling it breakfast research.

My calendar says it's Pancake Day, Johnny Appleseed Day, Dumpling Day, Public Lands Day, and Nuclear Weapons Elimination Day. Flip a stack of pancakes, plant an apple tree in Johnny's honor, grab some dumplings, volunteer at a park if you've got the energy, and take a moment to appreciate that the world still has zero nuclear weapons eliminated by wishing really hard about it.

Today in History:
1580: English seaman Francis Drake returns to Plymouth aboard the Golden Hind, becoming the first British navigator to circumnavigate the globe.
1777: British troops occupy Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
1789: The Senate confirms Thomas Jefferson as the first U.S. secretary of state, John Jay as the first chief justice, and Edmund Randolph as the first attorney general.
1810: Sweden's Riksdag of the Estates adopts the Act of Succession, still part of the Swedish constitution today.
1820: Frontiersman Daniel Boone dies in his sleep at his son's home near present-day Defiance, Missouri, at age 85.
1892: John Philip Sousa and his newly formed band give their first public performance, in Plainfield, New Jersey.
1914: Congress establishes the Federal Trade Commission.
1937: The radio drama The Shadow, starring Orson Welles, premieres on the Mutual Broadcasting System.
1949: Renovators shorten the Hollywood sign from "Hollywoodland" to the version everyone recognizes today.
1957: West Side Story opens on Broadway.
1960: John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon face off in the first televised presidential debate, as an estimated 70 million Americans watch.
1962: James Meredith is turned away a third time from registering at the University of Mississippi; this time, the perpetrator is Gov. Paul Johnson.
1969: The Beatles release Abbey Road in the United Kingdom.

Birthdays Today include: George Gershwin, composer of Rhapsody in Blue; Olivia Newton-John, singer and actress known for Grease; Serena Williams, tennis champion and 23-time Grand Slam singles winner; and Christina Milian, singer and actress — if today's your birthday, too, happy birthday to you, to coin a phrase.

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Every once in a while, a story comes along that's so bizarre it defies making fun of it — because reality has already out-satirized anything a columnist could add. Such is the case of Hannah Gann of Philadelphia.

We turn to the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, by way of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

A Jewish public school teacher and pro-Palestinian advocate in Philadelphia has admitted to fabricating Palestinian, Tunisian and Black heritage to her colleagues for years, in a case that some online commenters are dubbing "the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal."

You may not remember Rachel Dolezal, but the cross-reference is spot on. She was the one who infamously tried to pass herself off as being black, in much the same way as Elizabeth Warren tried to pass herself off as Cherokee, and Beto O'Rourke tried to pass himself off as Hispanic. Obviously, the answer to the question of "Why?" comes back more or less, to the fact that in these people’s estimation, there is something of an advantage for adopting such a label.

Dolezal, particularly, came out as being bisexual, according to reports from the New York Post. She was also hit with felony theft charges involving welfare fraud. More crackers than a box of Ritz.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

Gann posted confessions and apologies to social media this week, following confrontations from local pro-Palestinian groups she'd worked with for years. In her apology, she identified herself as "a white woman with significant privilege and wealth" who has "no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage." A JTA request for comment went unanswered.

Wait. Palestinian, Tunisian, and black? All at once? Gang, that's not an identity crisis, that's a whole immigration file. It certainly defies any writer’s attempt to satirize it. Dolezal must be watching this with a sense of awe written all over her face.

But wait, there’s more!

Two local activist groups she'd worked alongside for years — Philly Educators for Palestine and the Racial Justice Organizing Committee — said in their own statement, posted to Facebook:

Gann was "of Jewish heritage and [part of] an Israeli settler family." They further accused her of falsely claiming to be Black at various points, until they confronted her about her background days ago.

According to NBC News' coverage, the two groups said members met with Gann and questioned her for over an hour before she finally admitted she'd been lying, and they described themselves as "stunned, saddened and angered by this betrayal" before permanently cutting ties. So wait. She’s supporting you, and you consider this a betrayal?

I would advise you to check out our Rick Moran's writeup on this, which brings up a number of the finer points of the case.

Neither of Gann's public social media apologies mentioned the Jewish heritage part. But the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing internal documents from the activist groups, reported that she'd identified herself in college as a "Jewish woman with family in the occupied West Bank." She'd also told colleagues her grandfather was born in Palestine — he was reportedly born in Baltimore, according to the same documents. Fellow activists accused her of darkening her skin with makeup and fake tanner and adopting a black American accent after returning from a stint in the Peace Corps in Rwanda. A former college classmate told Ynet she was startled to see how much Gann's appearance had changed since their school days, saying Gann had "clearly made herself look darker through makeup and artificial tanning." Hmmm. Not orange, huh?

As with Rachel Dolezal, commenters piled on, accusing Gann of posing as a member of a marginalized group to collect clout she hadn't earned. Well, yeah — that's kind of a difficult conclusion to avoid, particularly given the other stories of a similar nature I mentioned already.

Here's where the story gets genuinely rich, because Mediaite's writeup fills in the biographical gaps the confession video conveniently skipped: Gann is a 10th-grade teacher who reportedly grew up in a $1.8 million home, the daughter of a "prominent" Yale-educated tax attorney and a mother who's a Democratic Party donor. Her actual parents, per multiple reports, live in Israel. This is not a woman who grew up scraping by on the margins of anyone's marginalization. She built an entire activist identity, and apparently a fair amount of professional standing, out of pretending to be exactly what she isn't — while her real family was living the life the imagined one was supposedly speaking truth to power against.

And the activism wasn't quiet. The Inquirer notes Gann had been outspoken enough that a mobile billboard once parked outside her school calling her "Philadelphia's Leading Antisemite" — courtesy of the conservative group Accuracy in Media, which confirmed to JTA that they'd targeted her specifically. The group's founder, Adam Guillette, said in a statement:

"Hannah Gann remains one of Philadelphia's leading antisemites."

Not bad for a Jewish girl from Philly, huh?

She organized a teach-in at her school in 2024, protesting what she called "scholasticide" in Gaza. She spoke at Philadelphia Board of Education meetings. By every outward measure, she was a committed, visible, credentialed voice of the movement she'd apparently fabricated her own standing within.

In a follow-up video, per NBC's reporting, Gann insisted that nobody in her life had known:

"There is not a single person on this planet, no friend, no fellow organizer, no one in my family, no professional connection, no secret op or handler who knew what I was doing."

She said she'd hidden her family's background from everyone in Philadelphia, and hidden from her own family what she was doing in Philadelphia. That's not a slip. That's a sustained, deliberate, years-long double life, run in both directions simultaneously, apparently without a single confidant on either end.

I truly do not envy the Babylon Bee its job these days. I know, I said that just recently about a different story this month, and here I am saying it again, because reality keeps arriving at the same conclusion faster than satire can.

A white Jewish woman with parents living in Israel spent years as a self-declared Palestinian, Tunisian, and black activist, darkened her skin with drugstore tanner to sell the performance, got a truck parked outside her school calling her an antisemite, and never once broke character until two of her own activist groups sat her down and made her admit it out loud. You couldn't pitch this as fiction. No editor would buy it.

The Philadelphia School District, for its part, told NBC that it's aware of the situation and is "making support available" to staff and students at the Workshop School, which is the appropriately bureaucratic, appropriately bloodless response to a story this deranged. Meanwhile, the activist groups she deceived are left holding a statement about "profound harm" done to "Palestinians whose identity and struggle were appropriated" — by one of their own most visible advocates, who apparently manufactured the whole thing from a $1.8 million house.

Rachel Dolezal, at minimum, had the decency to just pick one fake identity and stick with it for a decade. Gann tried to run three simultaneously, in front of the same community, for years, and nearly pulled it off. That's either the least self-aware person in Philadelphia, or the most committed method actor never to win an award for it.

And then there are the people who lapped up the stories she told like a thirsty dog, and then because the woman is of a Jewish background, called her support for their cases a betrayal. The mind boggles.

Certainly, this is a tragedy of mental health, which resulted from marginalization becoming social currency.

Put another way, when victims are lionized, victimhood becomes the coin of the realm.

In that framing, we could add the names of Jussie Smolett, and even Christine Blasey Ford as off-the-cuff examples. (The inclusion of Ford in this list makes sense in the context of the social weight a claim of victimhood brings.)

You guys know very well that normally, I’d be closing on some kind of witty word or two, but as odd as my commentary gets at times, I’ve got nothing on this.

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Thought for the Day: Nixon lost the first televised debate mostly on how he looked, not what he said — a reminder that the medium deciding the message didn't start with social media, it just got faster at it.

VIP members: Your turn. Your voice matters. You know what to do.

Take care, gang. Enjoy your Saturday. I'll see you here tomorrow.

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