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The historian who uncovered the ADL’s secret plot against the far-right John Birch Society
(JTA) — A historian leafing through files in an archive discovered how a Jewish organization helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s by going undercover and acting as self-appointed spies.
The discovery of the Anti-Defamation League’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society is the basis of a chapter in a new book by political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. Published in March, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” is Dallek’s fourth book. It examines the roots of today’s emboldened conservative movement in the United States.
“Birchers” is a history of a group that at its height numbered as many as 100,000 members and “mobilized a loyal army of activists” in a campaign against what it saw as a vast communist conspiracy. He also examines how the Birchers’ mission to defend Christianity and capitalism morphed into a radical anti-civil rights agenda that groups like the ADL saw as an existential threat.
Dallek, who grew up in a Reform Jewish household in Los Angeles, recently sat with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to discuss the rise of the Birchers, how the ADL infiltrated their ranks and whether such tactics are justified in the name of fighting extremism.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
JTA: Before we get into the Jewish aspect of the book, meaning the chapter on the Anti-Defamation League’s relationship with the John Birch Society, let’s take a step back. Who are so-called Birchers? Why do they matter?
Mathew Dallek: The John Birch Society was a household name in the 1960s, becoming the emblem of far-right extremism. It didn’t have huge numbers, but it did penetrate the culture and the national consciousness. Its leader, Robert Welch, had argued at one point that President Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of a communist conspiracy taking over the United States. Welch formed the John Birch Society to educate the American people about the nature of the communist threat.
In its heyday, the group had about 60,000 to 100,000 members, organized into small chapters. They sent out literature trying to give members roadmaps or ideas for what they could do. They believed a mass education of the public was needed because traditional two-party politics was not going to be very effective at exposing the communist threat. They would form front groups such as Impeach Earl Warren [the Supreme Court’s chief justice] or Support Your Local Police. They tried to ban certain books that they viewed as socialistic from being used in schools. Some Birchers ran for school board seats and protested at libraries.
Critics feared that the Birchers were a growing fascist or authoritarian group and that if they were not sidelined politically and culturally then the country could be overrun. The Nation magazine wrote that Birchers essentially had given their followers an invitation to engage in civil war, guerrilla-style. Those fears sparked a big debate about democracy. How does one sustain democracy and, at the height of the Cold War and in the shadow of World War II, Nazi fascist Germany, and the Holocaust?
As you were researching, you came across a trove of historical internal documents from the ADL in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Why did you devote a chapter to what you found in those documents? What did those files reveal to you about the John Birch Society?
These papers are a goldmine. They’re this incredible and often detailed window into the far-right and, in particular, the John Birch Society. They show the ADL had an extensive, multi-dimensional counterintelligence operation that they were running against the Birch Society.
People knew at the time that the ADL was attending events where Birchers were speaking. But the ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers. They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.
Another layer is about a debate that’s been going on: Were the Birchers racist and antisemitic? The Birch Society always insisted that they did not tolerate white supremacy and didn’t want any KKK members. They said they accepted people of all faiths and races. And it’s true that they did have a handful of Jewish and Black members.
But what the ADL found was that a lot of hate was bubbling up from the grassroots and also leaking out from the top. The ADL was able to document this in a systematic way.
Some critics of the ADL today say the organization has strayed from its mission by focusing not just on antisemitism but on a wider array of causes. But from reading your work, it sounds like the ADL even then took an expansive view of its role, examining not just direct attacks on Jews but also how the political environment can jeopardize Jews. Am I getting that right, and why did the ADL devote so many resources to a group like the John Birch Society?
So, a few things: It’s the late ’50s and ’60s, and a civil rights coalition is emerging. Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL, was friendly with Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy went to an ADL event and praised the ADL for speaking out very strongly in defense of democracy and pushing for the equal treatment of all Americans.
Isadore Zack, who helped lead the spy operation, at one point wrote to his colleagues that it was only in a democracy that the Jewish community has been allowed to flourish and so, if you want to defend Jewish Americans, you also have to defend democracy.
There certainly were other threats at the time, but the Birch Society was seen by liberal critics, including the ADL, as a very secretive group that promoted conspiracy theories about communists who often became conflated with Jews.
Would you consider the ADL successful in its campaign against the Birchers?
They were successful. They used surreptitious and in some cases underhanded means to expose the antisemitism and the racism and also interest in violence or the violent rhetoric of the Birch Society in the 1960s.
The ADL was at the tip of the spear of a liberal coalition that included the White House, sometimes the Department of Justice, depending on the issue, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, labor unions, the union-backed Group Research Inc., which was tracking the far-right as well. The ADL was one of the most, if not the most effective at constraining and discrediting the society.
Clearly, however, the Birchers’ ideas never died. They lived on and made a comeback.
It’s somewhat ironic that you reveal the existence of this spying apparatus devoted to targeting an extremist and antisemitic group in the 1960s given the infamy the ADL would earn in a later era, the 1990s, for allegations that they colluded with police agencies in San Francisco to spy on and harass political activists. They eventually settled with the Arab American, Black and American Indian groups that brought a federal civil suit. I know you didn’t study these revelations, which are outside the scope of your book, but could you perhaps reflect on why undercover tactics were seen as necessary or justified?
It’s important to remember that in the mid-20th century, law enforcement in the United States was often led by antisemites or people who were much more concerned with alleged internal communist threats — the threat from the left.
From the ADL’s vantage point, one could not rely on the government entities that were by law and by design supposed to protect Jewish Americans. There was a sense that this work had to be done, at least in part, outside of the parameters of the government.
When I first discovered the ADL’s spying, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I realized they weren’t just spying to spy, they exposed a lot of scary things, with echoes in our own times — like easy access to firearms, a hatred of the government, a denigration and defamation of minority groups. And this was all happening in the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II. I became much more sympathetic; they were very effective, and they had a vision of equality of treatment for all Americans.
It’s obviously controversial. I try not to shy away from it. But they had a lot of good reasons to fight back right and to fight back in this nonviolent way.
That last thought brings to mind another, right-wing Jewish group that existed in this era of taking things into our own hands, that did use violence, explosives even.
You mean the Jewish Defense League, led by Meir Kahane.
Yes, exactly.
He was a Bircher. Toward the end of my book, I mention that he was a member for a while, under his alias Michael King.
Antisemitism is on the rise, and lots of initiatives are being organized to address it, both by existing groups like the ADL and new ones. The ADL’s budget has almost doubled over the past seven years. I am seeing Jews talk of fighting back and taking things into their own hands. And we are in this politically precarious movement in American history, all of which suggests parallels to the era you examined. What kind of wisdom can we glean from examining the ADL’s secret and public fight against the John Birch Society as people who care about the issues affecting Jews today?
A lot of liberals in the 1960s and a lot of the leadership at the ADL grasped the axiom that things can always get worse.
In 2015-2016, you’ll recall, there was Trump’s demonization of Mexican immigrants, and the so-called “alt-right” around him and his campaign and expressions of vitriol by people like Steve Bannon.
There was an assumption among a lot of Americans and among a lot of Jewish Americans that the fringe right — the antisemites, the explicit racists, the white supremacists — that there’s not a majority for them and they can never achieve power.
If you go back and you look at Trump’s closing 2016 campaign ad, it’s textbook antisemitism. He flashes on screen these wealthy Jewish international bankers, and he argues that basically, there’s a conspiracy of these global elites who are stealing the wealth of honest Americans. There’s also 2017, the white supremacists in Charlottesville, who said “Jews will not replace us” and Trump saying there are fine people on both sides.
The sense that democracy is incredibly fragile is not just a theory or a concept: It’s an actuality, the sense as well, that the United States has only been a multiracial democracy for not very long and a haven for Jews for not that long either.
The work that the ADL and the NAACP and other groups did to try to constrain and discredit as fringe and extremist still goes on today. It’s harder to do for all sorts of reasons today including social media and the loss of faith in institutions. But it still goes on. You see the importance of institutional guardrails including the Department of Justice that is prosecuting 1,000 Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of the admirable things in the 1960s about the ADL and the liberal coalition it belonged to is that it built support for landmark legislation like the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. And a coalition eventually fell apart, but it was powerful, reminding us why Jewish American groups should care about or focus on issues that don’t directly affect Jewish people.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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