By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
There is a moment in the lifespan of every cause célèbre
when the hard truth must be faced: The privileged place to be is in the shoes
of the underprivileged.
Call it the Dolezal Moment.
Rachel Dolezal, you’ll remember, was the white woman who
was exposed as having pretended to be black so she could run an NAACP chapter,
work her way up the academic-administrative ladder, and benefit from minority
hiring practices.
It was a cultural moment precisely because it brought to
public attention the fact that in certain important institutional pipelines, it
was better for white people to claim to be black.
Well, I give you Hannah Gann. From the Philadelphia
Inquirer:
A Philadelphia teacher is being
called the ‘Palestinian Rachel Dolezal’ after being caught lying about her
background — a deception that has stirred strong emotions in education and
racial justice organizing circles.
Hannah Gann, a veteran
Philadelphia School District educator, has claimed at times to be Palestinian
and Black, and was so outspoken a mobile billboard once parked outside her
school calling her ‘Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.’
The problem: “Gann, it turns out, is white and Jewish,
and lied about her identity for years.”
Palestinian identity is the golden ticket in the West at
the moment. Palestine is the omnicause—the one issue everyone must dedicate
themselves to at the expense of all others. In the Democratic Party, the
Palestinian omnicause is the only litmus test for political participation.
Culturally, Palestinian clout is just as strong. Want
relevance in the music world? Say “free Palestine” until you’re blue in the
face while wrapped in a keffiyeh. Want more acting jobs? Javier Bardem says the
answer is a single-minded public obsession with smearing Israel as a genocidal
state and, of course, wearing the keffiyeh.
If you want a Pulitzer, write pro-Palestinian essays.
If you want an Academy Award, make a pro-Palestinian film.
Want the Special Jury Prize in Venice? Make a piece of easily debunked agitprop
about Israelis killing Palestinians. Want a book deal? Write a novel about
Being Palestinian Today. Want fame in the art world? You know the drill.
And, hey, want tenure? How quickly can you erase Israel
from a map and a syllabus?
Plus, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card in many
jurisdictions. Want those charges dropped? Say you did it “for Palestine.” In
the U.S., you can still get away with a whole assortment of crimes, though if
you kill a Jew in broad daylight while yelling about Palestine you might have
to spend a year in the slammer.
It’s true, none of this actually frees Palestine. But in
America, only when one is “for Palestine” can one be truly free.
And so Hannah Gann was living the new American dream:
Gann, who teaches at the Workshop
School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, was front and
center in education activism work after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
In 2024, for instance, Gann
participated in a West Philadelphia ‘teach-in’ on ‘scholasticide’ — the
destruction of educational infrastructure — in Gaza. Her biography for that
event identified her as a Palestinian American…
According to a document compiled
by the Philly Palestine Coalition and obtained by The Inquirer, Gann has made
frequent references to Palestinian family, including a Palestinian-born
grandfather whom the PPC found was actually born in Baltimore, citing historical
draft records and her great-grandfather’s U.S. naturalization papers. Her
family abroad live in Israel, according to the group’s extensive, footnoted
research.
In fairness, who doesn’t have a Palestinian
grandfather these days? Forget the coalminer grandfather or the mailman father,
if you want to run for office get yourself a nakba backstory.
Just make sure you cover your tracks. Hannah Gann didn’t,
and when her Palestinian and Palestinian-adjacent friends and colleagues
investigated her, the story quickly unraveled. The Racial Justice Organizing
Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine asked Gann to “publicly
acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler
family,” which she promptly did on social media.
Now she must atone for her sins. But can you blame her
for trying? She went to an Ivy League university, where presumably she learned
the hard way that being “white and Jewish” is no way to go through life. She
wanted a taste of real privilege. Such is what it means to be a victim in
America today: Suddenly, all the doors are open to you.
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