Hannah Gann long claimed that she was Palestinian, black, and Tunisian. But the Philadelphia schoolteacher was recently outed by her fellow activists in the Philly Palestine Coalition as wealthy, white, and Jewish. Social media and newspapers have treated her as a Palestinian equivalent of Rachel Dolezal, the Washington State NAACP official who, having for years claimed to be black, admitted in 2015 that she had been “born white to white parents.”
While the comparison is humorous, it would be a mistake to let Gann become just another punchline. In reality, she is part of the vast network of dedicated teacher-activists in Philadelphia public schools misusing their classrooms to encourage extreme political activism. Maybe this embarrassing incident will provide an opportunity to examine their influence on Philadelphia schoolchildren.
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Gann was a leader in the Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC) and its subgroup, Philadelphia Educators for Palestine (PEFP). She appeared to run the RJOC and PEFP’s social media, was a co-administrator in the PEFP’s Signal chat, and ran many of the group’s workshops and teach-ins. Strikingly, after Gann’s outing, the PEFP announced its dissolution. Both groups were founded by teachers and administrators in the district. Since her ruse was revealed, Gann’s co-activists in the RJOC and PEFP now want the school district to “take the necessary steps to hold Hannah accountable for the harm she caused” and “prevent any further harm to students.” But Gann and her fellow teacher-activists have engaged in far more extreme conduct than faking ethnic ancestry—conduct the district permitted to happen.
The PEFP has involved current high school students in its organizing work. That’s alarming, given that the PEFP’s “grounding commitments” maintain that “all resistance is righteous” and that the group “reject[s] false equivalence between the violent systems that oppress us and our responses to them.” In other words, students are being included in a group that endorses violence as a means of political action.
PEFP’s conduct may also violate district rules governing employee-student communications. Gann and other members of PEFP have involved students in activist Signal chats with other adults, many of them teachers in the district. The Signal chats not only discussed PEFP’s planned activities but also advertised actions involving other activist groups in Philadelphia.
These actions can be extreme. In the Signal chat and on Instagram, Gann and other members of the PEFP advertised the “Rally for Rage and Resistance.” The poster for the rally used imagery associated with the Hamas attack on October 7 and included the following tagline: “Reject Normalization. Honor the Martyrs. Uplift Resistance.” The PEFP also hosted teach-ins, alongside Students for Justice in Palestine, for students as young as middle school on “building solidarity and resistance with Palestine.”
Through the RJOC, a number of Philadelphia public school teachers and administrators are connected to a broader network of activist groups. The RJOC grew out of the Caucus of Working Educators (CWE), a progressive caucus within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. The CWE, in turn, emerged from the Teacher Activist Group (TAG) Philly, which is part of a nationwide coalition of teacher activist organizations including the Association of Raza Educators (ARE), Rethinking Schools, New York Collective of Radical Educators, and Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago. TAG Philly runs an annual conference for district teachers; this year’s conference featured a workshop entitled “From Venezuela to Iran: Understanding US Imperialism Under Trump.”
This network of activist teachers works with organizations like Black Lives Matter and the W.E.B Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, a Marxist group that does not shrink from political violence. With Gann’s help and the school district’s approval, the Du Bois School has run multiple “liberation” workshops for Philadelphia public school students. These events were, as the Washington Free Beacon reported, “taught by a convicted felon who has argued that Jews control the media and was involved in torching a police car.”
Unsurprisingly, Israel is a major focus of the Philadelphia activist teacher network. The network encourages students and teachers to see the Jewish state as a settler-colonial, fundamentally racist, oppressive, and genocidal entity.
For example, at the 2025 TAG Philly conference, Gann led a workshop on “Teaching Palestine,” one of many similar sessions RJOC runs to help Philadelphia public school teachers bring one-sided narratives into the classroom. Gann also helped lead a workshop on Rethinking Schools’ book Teaching Palestine for district students and teachers. Gann had coauthored a chapter for the book entitled “Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power Activists,” which characterizes opposition to Israel as “anti-imperialist.” The rest of Rethinking Schools’ book includes lessons that help teachers describe how October 7 was the result of U.S. and Israeli actions. Teaching Palestine is not a fringe book; it has been used in teacher-training programs, and Rethinking Schools has run workshops on it for teachers across the country, some hosted by teachers’ associations.
On September 30, the Pennsylvania State Senate will hold a hearing on anti-Semitism that will include a discussion about anti-Semitism in educational settings. Gann’s name belongs in that discussion, but not because she is the “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal.” It’s because her case points to a broader problem: a network of radical activists working to influence Philly’s K-12 students and a school district that has failed to hold them accountable.