We live in an era in which fashionable opinion holds it to be an unquestioned truth that biological gender must be considered fluid and changeable, but racial and ethnic identity is not. That’s more a function of ideology than science. Yet the ideas that are the foundation of these complicated and sometimes illogical notions are a formula for a social architecture that prizes one thing above all: victim status.
That’s the best way to understand the peculiar phenomenon of individuals who choose to adopt the identity of a group other than the one they were born into, so as to acquire the much-prized modern privilege that goes with victimhood.
The most famous of these was Rachel Dolezal, a white woman of European heritage who masqueraded as an African American, taught African-American studies on the college level and even was chosen as the president of the Spokane, Kansas chapter of the NAACP before her fraud was exposed in 2015.
Another, less celebrated, racial impersonator was Jessica Krug, a radical ideologue who was a tenured professor of history at George Washington University. She pretended to be a black and Hispanic woman from “El Barrio” in New York City’s Bronx, but was really a middle-class, white, Jewish woman who grew up in suburban Kansas City and attended a day school.
A Jew who became ‘Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite’
And now there’s a new addition to this bizarre list of racial impersonators: Hannah Gann.
Gann is a Philadelphia high-school teacher who claims, at times, to be of Palestinian and Tunisian heritage and sometimes also to be black. In this guise, she became a leading local advocate for the anti-Israel cause, organizing an event at public schools alleging that the Jewish state was committing “scholasticide” against Palestinians and speaking up as a member of the “Philly Palestine Coalition” and “Parents for Palestine.”
She gained local notoriety for her efforts on behalf of a colleague and longtime friend, Keziah Ridgeway, who was suspended for making threats against Jewish parents who complained about her inserting anti-Israel propaganda into the classroom.
As the Canary Mission website noted on a page devoted to her activities,
Gann has celebrated Hamas terrorism, glorified violence and spread hatred of Israel, America and the police on her now-deleted Instagram page. She was a participant at a December 2023 “Flood Philly for Palestine” rally (a reference to the Hamas name for the Oct. 7 attacks that they dubbed the “Al Aqsa flood”), at which she not only praised the mass slaughter of Jews and joined in chants calling for Jewish genocide and terrorism against Jews, but also demonstrated against a Jewish-owned restaurant in the city.
So prominent was she in the effort to demonize the Jewish state and its Jewish supporters, that the Accuracy in Media group, once parked a mobile billboard outside her school calling her “Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.”
But, like Dolezal and Krug, Gann was a con artist, not a “person of color” or a Palestinian. She was, in fact—as she subsequently admitted in a groveling on-line apology—“a white woman of significant privilege and wealth.”
And if that was enough to outrage her former allies, it turns out that she’s also Jewish with family living in Israel.
As with Dolezal and Krug, Gann’s deceptions, which might have included financial fraud, are being angrily denounced as a form of “black face” and for damaging the “pro-Palestine” movement and harming the black students she taught.
The lure of victimhood
The appeal of victimhood is rooted in woke notions that see the world divided into two eternally warring and impermeable classes of persons. On the one side are people of color who are always victims and always in the right no matter what they do. On the other are the white oppressors who are always in the wrong, regardless of their conduct or the context of events.
The toxic ideologues of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism have adopted this skewed way of looking at the world and indoctrinated a generation of Americans to view everything through the lens of racial conflict. Believers in this secular religion not only dismiss the enormous progress made toward racial equality made in the United States over the last 70 years. Its supporters also actively oppose the vision of a color-blind society articulated by Martin Luther King Jr., who famously said he had a dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
In a society where such terrible and destructive ideas are treated as universal truth, by the lights of this belief system, some find themselves locked into an identity that marks them as permanent villains. While the majority seeks atonement for its “whiteness” and “privilege” by activism aimed at bringing down a falsely perceived oppressor class, others, like Dolezal, Krug and Gann, go further and adopt the identity of one of the oppressed, thus transforming into an exotic, fashionable persona with real privilege in the world of leftist ideology.
But what makes Gann’s masquerade particularly objectionable is that while she and the “pro-Palestine” crowd pose as virtuous victims, their cause itself is a fraud and one that actively engages in hatred of their own people.
While such left-wing ideologies and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in which they are based are bad for everyone, they also take particular aim at Israel and Jews, whom they falsely label as part of the “white” oppressor class. Because this belief system venerates victimhood and despises success, the Jews—the most persecuted group in world history, to the frustration of many liberals longing to be counted among the permanently oppressed—must always be redefined as victimizers rather than victims of hate.
According to this inversion of reality, the Jews are denied the right to live in Israel, the country in which they are indigenous. And Zionism, their national-liberation movement, is smeared as a form of unique evil whose overthrow is believed to be linked to the salvation of the whole world. Instead of helping Palestinians, as they claim to be doing, those who cheer on this madness are locking them into a permanent state of futile warfare and misery.
Far from a language of genuine liberation, the woke rhetoric about Israel and Zionists that Gann and her former friends spew, comes straight out of a script written by Soviet propagandists in the 1960s and ‘70s. Its purpose is the overthrow of Western civilization and American liberty and its replacement by Marxist tyranny, not freedom for the oppressed.
Gann deserves the opprobrium she’s getting for her pathetic play-acting. As with Dolezal and Krug, that involved trying to appear more dark-skinned with the aid of makeup and a fake tan. It also included, as a former classmate of Gann’s at the University of Pennsylvania who knew her before she started to pretend to be a Palestinian, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, not merely changing her appearance but often speaking in a dialect or form of slang that the politically correct now refer to as “African-American Vernacular English.”
A catalogue of lies
Gann said in her apology, “The fact that I lied about who I was does not mean anyone else who speaks up for Palestine is lying.”
But, of course, that’s exactly the point. The entire rhetoric of “Free Palestine” is a catalogue of lies.
Indeed, the rewriting of the history of ancient Israel and the modern state, as well as the repeated Palestinian-Arab rejections of any peace offer that does not involve the expulsion of Jews from their homeland, is essential to the movement’s cause. From the fabricated statistics about Palestinian casualties in the post-Oct. 7 war they started, to their denials of the atrocities, including mass murder, torture and rape committed that day by the Palestinians (which were filmed on Go-Pro cameras and posted on the social-media accounts of some of the victims to cause even more pain to their relatives and friends), to their denigration of the suffering of the hundreds who were kidnapped on that Jewish holiday, “pro-Palestine” discourse aims not merely to deny reality, but to invert it.
Above all, the dialectic of Palestinianism aims at stripping Jews of rights and falsely portraying them as criminal monsters and modern-day Nazis, while glorifying an Islamist movement whose sole purpose is Jewish genocide and destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet. And in order to accomplish this, they have, with the aid of a biased media, spread blood libels about the Jews committing “genocide” and their democratic nation being an “apartheid state.”
While few go as far as pretending to be Palestinian, the anti-Israel movement nevertheless welcomes those who want to participate in the struggle of the alleged victims. As we’ve seen on American college campuses and in the streets of the country’s cities, those who adopt their lies and target Jews, as Gann and her friends did, have been indoctrinated to think of themselves as righteous activists, not purveyors of hate. In so doing, they acquire a vicarious sort of victimhood that gives them a higher status in the culture of the left, even if they still remain white and intrinsically bad.
Among them are Jews, such as the members of Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which traffic in other antisemitic blood libels, such as the preposterous accusation that Israel trains American police and first responders to murder African Americans.
Seen in this context, it’s easy to see that Gann’s desperate attempt to escape her “whiteness” and Jewish identity in order to be a member of the ironically more privileged victim class, didn’t just lead to lies about her origins. The identity she chose was itself based on a web of deception, concocted by ideologues and spread by those, like Gann, whose idea of education is shoving propaganda down the throats of students—not sharing the treasure of Western thought and ideals.
Those who joined Gann in the chants for genocide and terror against the Jews may not have transgressed the racial taboo of cultural and racial appropriation that the left despises. They may fool themselves into believing that she betrayed their cause with her lies.
But with their cosplaying of Palestinian terrorists in their costumes of keffiyehs and masks, and their recitations of Soviet and Hamas propaganda aimed at promoting antisemitism, the difference between their frauds and hers is not as great as they think.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
