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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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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.
