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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7
A raft of pro-Palestinian and democratic socialist groups will protest against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, accusing the mayor of capitulating to pro-Israel pressure since taking office.
More than 20 local organizations, most of them college chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine or Young Democratic Socialists of America, are participating in the event, which will culminate with a rally at City Hall. (Young Democratic Socialists America is the student offshoot of the DSA.)
The groups’ complaints against the mayor include his allowing a law to take effect that allows NYPD to implement security perimeters at places of worship and launching a plan to combat antisemitism that includes funding for Jewish community groups that do not disavow Israel.
“Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement,” the groups said in a caption alongside a poster for the event. “He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality. Instead, he has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure.”
The protest comes even as Mamdani, who drew on the support of local progressive groups in his run for office, continues to hammer the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from City Hall. But the protest — which appears to have split the city’s DSA movement — revealed growing discontent from the far-left with how Mamdani has governed.
It also underscored how uncompromising the left flank of the democratic socialists can be on matters related to Israel.
Why leftist groups are protesting Mamdani
Mamdani rode into office last November on a swell of pro-Palestinian support and democratic socialist organizing power. He rejected many of the pro-Israel norms of New York City campaign trail, including by promising to arrest Netanyahu if he ever visited New York and calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
Since taking office, Mamdani has revoked an anti-BDS executive order signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, and the city’s previously accepted definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Mamdani also publicly defended pro-Palestinian student protesters detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and opposed the West Bank land sales at local synagogues.
And even in a public appearance conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani reiterated his stance that the Israeli premier is a war criminal.
Still, he has tried to court Jewish groups by pledging to address antisemitism through his new multimillion dollar strategy that allocates $6.4 million to community organizations. He has also visited with Jews in all five boroughs to build community relations.
Their criticism of Mamdani for the security perimeter bill reflected disappointment in the mayor for something he couldn’t do much about. The bill, Int. No. 1-B, passed in March with a supermajority, meaning he was unable to veto it. Rather than sign it into law, Mamdani did not take action on it and it became law after 30 days. (He vetoed a separate bill creating a protest buffer zone for schools that had passed with a simple majority.)
The protesting groups argue the bill criminalizes protests against synagogues that host “illegal land sales” of property in the West Bank. Additionally, the chapters take issue with Mamdani’s antisemitism strategy providing security infrastructure to “Zionist synagogues” that hold these sales. The bill provides the same security to all synagogues regardless of their affiliation with Israel.
The online poster for the event states in its caption that Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism provides “funding for Zionist propagandist groups” such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council works in partnership with the UJA-Federation of New York to fight against antisemitism and foster support for Israel, including sponsoring tours to the country. Under a Mamdani-created program, JCRC will work with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
The mayor’s office declined the Forward’s request for comment. The organizations involved did not immediately respond to inquiries, except for Lehman College Young Democratic Socialists of America which declined.
The post ‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him?
(JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly this year came at a critical time for Israel. Talks were underway to resolve the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel was awaiting the outcome of the on-again, off-again U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. The country had also just been sanctioned by 12 countries, led by Britain, over its West Bank policies.
Yet it was Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor who has virtually no say in international relations, who drew the Israeli prime minister’s fiercest, most lengthy criticism. Mamdani, Netanyahu charged, was an antisemite, a “buddy” of Hamas, the husband of a supporter of the Oct. 7 massacre and the friend of a 9/11 enthusiast.
The U.N. address wasn’t the only time in the weeks leading up to Israel’s Oct. 27 election that Netanyahu focused his sights on Mamdani in an unusual forum. In August, Netanyahu’s Likud party launched an election billboard campaign showing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, with the slogan, “They want Netanyahu to lose, don’t let them win.”
In the weeks leading up to his visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, the prime minister and Mamdani went at each other on social media, with Mamdani calling for Netanyahu’s arrest in New York (while acknowledging he had no power to order it), and the prime minister accusing the mayor of antisemitism and support of Hamas.
Netanyahu is making the New York mayor a central bogeyman this election season – is it working?
It’s true that Mamdani, who is Muslim, is unpopular across most of the Jewish political spectrum in Israel. During his election campaign and since taking office, Mamdani has constantly accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing, charges most Jewish Israelis and politicians from both coalition and opposition parties reject.
But it is unlikely that the average Israeli would base his or her vote on a candidate’s attitude towards the mayor of New York. After all, Israelis have many other issues on their plate that are closer to home, such as the state of national security, accountability for the failures that allowed Hamas to carry out its deadly raids inside Israel on Oct. 7 and the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Israelis from IDF service.
Still, Netanyahu aide Caroline Glick, the prime minister’s international affairs adviser, said in an interview it was “obvious” and “self-explaining” that the prime minister would push back against a person who has been “spewing antisemitism.”
Glick repeated Netanyahu’s claim in his speech that New York Jews felt unsafe as a result of Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies. She said Mamdani “got what he ordered up” in the premier’s U.N. address. (Mamdani pushed back sharply on what he called Netanyahu’s “baseless lies” in the speech.)
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Mamdani started it. Mamdani “began a smear campaign already in July,” Danon said, referring to the video in which Mamdani called on the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, and the beefs on social media since then. Mamdani “fuels the fire and incites, and our approach is not to keep quiet versus inciters,” Danon wrote to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in response to a query.
There are plenty of other targets that Netanyahu can attack to bolster his reputation as a fighter. He took aim in his U.N. speech at the “moral cowards” who left the hall when he rose to speak, the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa, French President Emmanuel Macron, Turkish President Erdogan, Qatar, and the protestors outside the U.N. building.
So why did Mamdani consume so much oxygen?
Guy Levy, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained that Mamdani is not just a personal adversary but an emblem of a larger struggle. “Mamdani is a symbol of the rise in the West of the connection between the radical Left and Islamists and antisemites,” he told JTA.
That connects with a larger theme in Netanyahu’s campaign: arguing that a governing coalition without him would be dependent on a majority-Arab party and on the left-wing Democrats to get enough seats to form a majority. As such, he contends, they would be unable or unwilling to safeguard Israeli security interests.
The campaign’s most recent slogan is, “It’s either the Right or Palestine” (the two words rhyme in Hebrew), indicating that a rival government would agree to Palestinian statehood, which many Israelis view as a danger. Mamdani, according to Levy, is part of the same left-wing/Arab camp; attacking Mamdani is therefore an attack against Netanyahu’s political rivals. (Mamdani appears to favor a one-state solution – as do many on Israel’s right, although envisioning a very different type of single state.)
Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran Israeli-American pollster and senior political analyst for the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and a staunch Netanyahu critic, speculated that the decision to go after Mamdani may not have represented a premeditated strategy but rather a “scattershot” approach born out of the prime minister’s poor performance in polls.
“First of all, not much has helped Netanyahu electorally,” Scheindlin said in a phone interview with JTA. “His party is stuck in the polls. It hasn’t changed in a very long time.” She noted that the Likud is currently polling at around 20 to 22 seats or even lower and that the bloc of parties loyal to him for forming a coalition hovers at about 50 to 52 seats – far short of the 61 needed to be in the majority.
Netanyahu has been pushing two major themes in his election campaign, according to Scheindlin: a “positive” theme, stressing his government’s successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran; and a “negative” theme against likely Arab participation in a rival government led by Yashar party head Gadi Eisenkot, who is polling best right now.
The attacks against Mamdani fit into the negative frame, Scheindlin argued.
“The one about Mamdani plays into the theme that the whole world is against us, the world is being taken over by Muslims,” Scheindlin said. “These are openly racialized and racist themes against an Arab party and the Israeli government, against Muslims and anywhere else in the world.”
She added that Netanyahu and his government have been claiming that “any criticism coming from Europe of Israel is all because Europe has been taken over by Muslims,” and the New York focus now only expands that message in arguing that radical Islam has taken over the world.
During this government’s tenure, Israel’s standing in both Europe and the U.S. has plummeted, with many European countries imposing sanctions, arms sales blocks and harsh criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Now Netanyahu “is going to be the defender by attacking people like Mamdani rhetorically and politically,” she said.
Scheindlin said she did not believe that Mamdani’s presence in the Likud’s election campaign would sway any voters. “The Mamdani sign came and went. I would doubt if most Israelis even remember it right now,” she said. And while the attacks against Mamdani generally “played into his message,” the bottom line is that Netanyahu is “trying everything” at this point in the campaign.
Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, viewed the speech less as a desperate play and more as a natural part of Netanyahu’s election campaign. In an interview with CBS, Katz said that the speech’s idea was for Israelis to think that “The world is against us no matter what, but thank God we have a leader, in this case, Netanyahu, who can stand up to everyone and stick it to them.” Katz added that “this could bring him some votes, or at the very least consolidate the base.”
Calling Mamdani an antisemite and blaming him for Jews feeling unsafe in New York “plays out well,” Katz said to CBS, “because Israelis look at people like Mamdani and they don’t see much of a difference, whether it’s Mamdani or it’s President Erdogan of Turkey, or it’s some other tent encampment or protest on the streets of Sydney or Paris or London. It’s one and the same.”
With the U.N. speech behind him and more pressing issues to address, including new revelations about warnings Netanyahu received prior to Oct. 7 and the flydubai attack last week, the Mamdani-Netanyahu fight has receded into the rear-view mirror. But if Netanyahu is reelected or if he stays on as caretaker prime minister, the issue will likely resurface.
Mamdani focuses on Netanyahu now, but he has made clear over his career that his problem is generally with Israel, whichever government is leading it. Even if a new administration takes over in Jerusalem, it may find itself at odds with the mayor of New York – and with the growing movement of young democratic socialists that he represents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Philadelphia teacher who pretended to be Palestinian raised alarms for Jewish groups before she became infamous
(JTA) —
The first time most of the world heard Hannah Gann’s name was in late September, when the 34-year-old Philadelphia high school teacher and activist confessed to having fabricated a Palestinian and Black identity — with media reports revealing she was Jewish in real life.
But Jason Holtzman, director of Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council, first heard Gann’s name long before that: in December 2023.
At that time, he recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, she “made some pretty strident remarks” at a local rally called “Flood Philly For Palestine,” an apparent reference to the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
In video from the event shared with JTA, Gann said in reference to children in Gaza, “We owe them to take it to the streets and f–k the police until Palestine is free.”
Gann would appear on the JCRC’s radar several more times before her name hit the news for being “the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal,” when her story — accompanied by Philadelphia Inquirer reporting that she has Jewish family living in Israel — ricocheted across the internet to gain her instant notoriety. (The real-life Dolezal, a white woman who posed as Black for years and held a NAACP leadership role while teaching Africana Education at a Pacific Northwest college, has meanwhile expressed interest in meeting Gann.)
Gann’s revelations have led to the dissolution of the local pro-Palestinian educators group she had helped to lead since 2024. After leaving her Instagram confessions public for more than a week, Gann’s account was deactivated in the last few days.
Yet now that Gann’s background has grabbed headlines, Jewish groups alarmed by her behavior said the real story is being missed.
“It’s just being reported as if she simply is guilty of fraud, that she’s the new Rachel Dolezal,” Holtzman told JTA. “It’s missing part of the story, which is that she’s also an extremist who has spread antisemitic tropes and has brought inflammatory content into the classroom.”
A general view of the School District of Philadelphia offices on December 31, 2015 in Philadelphia City. (Paul Marotta/Getty Images)
A catalog of troubling incidents
In the JCRC’s monitoring of the School District of Philadelphia, Gann’s name pops up often. In 2024 she helped organize a pro-Palestinian “teach-in” project, an unofficial event staged for teachers in the district that the JCRC says “directed educators to materials that erased Israel from maps” and “characterized October 7 as ‘resistance.’”
That year she also posted an Instagram image of a fist rising from the ground holding a firearm, with paragliders — a symbol of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 — visible in the background, one of many social media posts of hers that employed extreme language or imagery around Israel.
A key part of Jewish critics’ charges, that Gann brought her activism into the classroom or into her lesson plans, is harder to pinpoint. But in one screenshot of her whiteboard that she posted to social media, Gann appeared to have planned a lesson on “Black Power & Palestine.” In addition, district personnel who had visited her class in 2024 found that it “contained a ‘Palestine will be free’ poster, a Palestinian flag, a keffiyeh, and a map of Israel filled with a keffiyeh design,” Holtzman claimed.
Gann did not respond to multiple JTA requests for comment.
JCRC officials and a local Jewish activist group had pushed the district to discipline Gann over her conduct before the scandal over her identity broke — including, they said, presenting the superintendent with a full record of Jewish parent concerns this March. But such efforts, they say, fell largely on deaf ears.
“We’ve pointed this out to the school district many times over the years,” Holtzman told JTA. He added that, in the JCRC’s view, Gann’s rally appearances and social media activity were in violation of district codes of conduct governing staff activity that could damage the district’s reputation — with her recent admission of falsifying her ethnic identity potentially violating an ethics code requiring employees to avoid falsification in their personal records.
“And they’ve basically done nothing about it,” he said.
It wasn’t only Holtzman and the JCRC urging the School District of Philadelphia to take some kind of action against Gann. Local Jewish activists filed a federal civil rights complaint against her and fellow activists in the district with whom she had formed a coalition, even entering into mediation with the district in an effort to establish new guidelines around personnel behavior.
The complaint argued, among other points, that Gann’s social media — where she has posted many controversial messages about Israel — should be considered an extension of her classroom.
Yet Gann continued to teach 10th grade at The Workshop School, a public high school in West Philadelphia with a focus on project-based learning. Under pressure from her fellow activists, she recently came clean about her identity.
A surprising confession
“I lied about my family and have been lying for years,” she wrote on Instagram on Yom Kippur. “I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth. Anyone who supported me was manipulated.”
Gann’s confession took even the Philadelphia Jewish groups who had been tracking her behavior by surprise. They told JTA they had not realized she had been identifying herself as Palestinian, nor that she was actually Jewish. Some of her fellow activists, in their own social media posts, said she had confided to them in the past that she was Jewish — while also continuing to insist she was Palestinian.
While the Philadelphia Inquirer has quoted activists accusing her of having “Israeli settler family,” it was unclear to the Jews who spoke to JTA whether Gann’s Israeli family actually lived in settlements in the occupied West Bank or whether the activists simply refer to all Israelis as settlers. Giving public comment at prior school board meetings, Gann had proclaimed, “I can’t visit my family in Palestine,” and “I have pushed myself to teach through the agony of my family living in a warzone, and only taken one day off this entire school year.”
To some Jews, such parsing is almost besides the point; they see the entire conversation around Gann’s identity as a distraction.
The bigger story, they said, is that she was using her position as a public school educator to push anti-Israel advocacy that included falsehoods about Israel without fear of punishment: a microcosm of what they see as a larger trend of growing pro-Palestinian sentiment among K-12 educators in many school districts and teachers’ unions that has raised alarm among Jewish groups.
A spokesperson for an ad hoc group of Jewish educators and families in the Philadelphia area, who asked to remain anonymous owing to what they viewed as death threats from a member of Gann’s former coalition, told JTA in a statement that the district failed to express interest in Gann until the scandal.
“Harm to the Jewish community is never addressed or rectified” by the district, the representative for the School District of Philadelphia Jewish Family Association (SDP JFA) said in an email.
A spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia declined to comment on whether the district would be disciplining Gann or if it had communicated with Jewish groups about her behavior prior to last week.
“The District is making support available to the Workshop School staff and students, as needed,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to JTA.
Meanwhile, one of the pro-Palestinian activist groups formerly associated with Gann, Philly Educators for Palestine, announced last week that “after much reflection,” it would dissolve, though “The work continues.” Its parent group, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, said it would be going on hiatus.
Prior to its announcement, Philly Educators for Palestine had publicly disassociated from Gann and had called for the district to discipline her.
“It’s one of the first times where I think that I really have common ground with the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine,” Holtzman quipped.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators block roads as they rally in front of Philadelphia City Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024, ahead of the presidential debate between US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Andrew Thomas / AFP via Getty Images)
Civil rights complaint filed
In 2024, SDP JFA filed a Title VI civil rights investigation with the U.S. Department of Education against a group of pro-Palestinian teachers in the district, alleging, among other things, that students had been targeted on the basis of their Jewish identity. Joining the complaint were the JCRC, the Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy group.
The groups eventually proceeded to mediation with the district, which agreed to institute changes such as drafting a district-wide anti-harassment statement; undergoing an anti-discrimination policy review; and instituting new training for staff, according to a copy of the resolution agreement viewed by JTA. Jewish groups, however, charge that the recommendations were never fully implemented.
The names of the teachers in the federal investigation were redacted in official filings. But according to emails shared with JTA, Gann was one of the named parties in the ADL’s amended complaint.
“Evidence suggests that Ms. Gann is utilizing her actual classroom and social media platforms as a digital extension of her classroom to disseminate antisemitic rhetoric, engage in prohibited political campaigning, and promote extremist ideologies to her students,” a letter sent by SDP JFA this May reads.
Following that email, Gann on Instagram made oblique references to the allegations, calling her unnamed critics “genocide enthusiasts who love to call the School District about what I’m teaching.” She also posted a fake lesson plan from her classroom whiteboard with scheduled “lessons” including “Jesus Was Palestinian.”
The Jewish parents and teachers in SDP JFA say their frustrations with Gann are also informed by an even more antagonistic encounter with Keziah Ridgeway, a fellow teacher and former ally of Gann’s who at one point had joined Gann in holding signs reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a school board meeting.
In 2024, following a controversy around one of Ridgeway’s lesson plans and an SDP JFA campaign against her, Ridgeway, believing herself targeted by Jewish online harassers, posted several of the group members’ names to Instagram.
In posts viewed by JTA, she accompanied this list with another post referencing the phrase, “Ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun,” which refers to a sudden reversal in power dynamics. In a third post, Ridgeway asked followers for recommendations for “Black owned [gun emoji] shops in or near Philly.”
The Jewish parents interpreted the series of posts as a threat directed at them, and reported Ridgeway to the district, ultimately leading to her suspension for a year; she has sued the district, alleging anti-Islamic bias. Gann forcefully advocated for Ridgeway’s reinstatement at board meetings.
Following Gann’s recent revelations, Ridgeway, too, disowned her in an Instagram video. “I can no longer be in community with someone who caused so much harm,” Ridgeway wrote on social media.
Ridgeway declined to comment to JTA, citing ongoing litigation.
Even if they feel it’s for the wrong reasons, the members of SDP JFA still want to see action taken against Gann. They are seeking to capitalize on her newfound infamy by renewing their calls to district officials to discipline her and “ameliorate the damage done to the Jewish community.”
Such demands echo communications Jewish parents have already been sending to the district for the better part of two years. In an email to administrators last year, they sought to sum up their complaints: “Allowing Ms. Gann to remain in a teaching position sends the message that Jewish students’ safety and dignity are not valued — that their teacher can publicly call for their eradication without consequence.”
The post The Philadelphia teacher who pretended to be Palestinian raised alarms for Jewish groups before she became infamous appeared first on The Forward.
