Chance McMahon-Harrer, PhD
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chancepmh.bsky.social
Chance McMahon-Harrer, PhD
@chancepmh.bsky.social
1K followers 480 following 800 posts
🏳️‍🌈 ✡️ ☭ | They/Them | PhD in Comparative Literature | Decolonial Thought and Rabbinic/Late Antique Literature | US American Living in Mainz | freelance copyediting/proofreading https://hcommons.org/members/cpmcmahon1988/
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chancepmh.bsky.social
Coming home to Mainz and my husband being able to hold the hard copy of his first book. Though, I don’t know who this Chance is 🤔
My husband holding up his book, “Devout and Defiant: How Pilgrims Changed the Franco-German Borderlands in the Age of Revolution” The dedication, “To Chance”
November 3, 2025 at 6:22 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Leaving Berlin, and this sweet (elderly) baby, today 🥺
Garfield, an orange British shorthair (?) laying on the loveseat in the kitchen
November 1, 2025 at 10:14 AM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Some of my favs though 🥰
Relief sculptures of Walter Benjamin and Marc Chagall Relief sculptures of Arthur Miller and Rosa Luxemburg Relief sculpture of Leonard Nemoy
October 21, 2025 at 6:36 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
We went to the Jewish Museum today in Berlin and, while it’s true, and he certainly is one of the most famous Jews, I do think it’s a little funny having Jesus on the wall of prominent Jewish individuals.
A relief of Jesus on the wall of prominent Jewish individuals
October 21, 2025 at 6:35 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
It’s not particularly aesthetic but this tart i made was pretty delicious
A homemade potato and carrot tart with sour cream
October 21, 2025 at 6:31 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I feel like the “don’t give them an excuse” argument comes up with every protest and it’s always people who would only support a protest that’s essentially the Free Speech Zone in Arrested Development
October 7, 2025 at 6:45 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
She’s hanging out in Berlin, alongside her more put together looking friend lol
October 5, 2025 at 1:46 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I can’t stop thinking about this bad taxidermy at the Museum für Naturkunde
A bad looking taxidermy ocelot made in the year 1819.
October 5, 2025 at 1:38 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Maybe it’s because I don’t spend enough time on here but BlueSky flagging this as intolerance is goofy AF.
October 4, 2025 at 8:40 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Ngl, the first thing I thought of when I read the words “ear seeding” was TWoK
A Ceti Eel crawling towards Pavel Chekov’s ear
October 4, 2025 at 6:07 AM
chancepmh.bsky.social
This painting is Renesmee level cursed
September 22, 2025 at 12:18 AM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I took a photo of a photo of my husband and his siblings as kids (he’s in the middle)
September 10, 2025 at 9:43 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I don’t disagree because I think Zionism absorbs antisemitism and is often antisemitic, but I do find Ben Ratskoff’s analysis of this phrase particularly compelling because he digs into some of what I think gets lost in these conversations about the phrase “Judeo-Christian.”
Excerpt highlighted from Ben Ratskoff’s essay “Improbable Spectacles,” “This concept marks an "occidentalization of the Jew," incorporating Jews within the sphere of the hegemonic Western nation-state, and consequently also suggests an effective alliance between theological enemies. The "occidentalization of the Jew" is Khaldoun Samman's term, used in the context of the history of Zionism to describe the "process by which a minority of European Jewry in the nineteenth century appropriated the ontological framework of East/West and used it to overturn the longstanding European legacy of categorizing the Jew as 'Oriental"" Except from Ratskoff’s essay “Improbable Spectacles”: While the Judeo-Christian spectacle typically masks the racial whiteness consolidating it, the racial hue of the empowered Judeo-Christian becomes visible when contextualized by Jewish emancipation in the white democratic state. And Baldwin's prism of Western imperialism prefigures the unproblematic contradictions sustained by racial whiteness in our contemporary moment. Judeo-Christian alliances form because a racial (white) alliance neutralizes the question of Jewish difference.
September 10, 2025 at 9:40 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
🥰🥰🥰
September 6, 2025 at 12:54 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Also finding another (more friendly) cat as we walked along the German-Austrian border 🥰
September 6, 2025 at 12:52 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Finding some sweet creatures at Schloss Neuburg
September 6, 2025 at 12:47 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Every city has its own Halloween Blizzard of 1991
Picture of my husband who is six feet tall standing below a flood water line from June 3, 2013 in Passau
September 5, 2025 at 10:41 AM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I am thinking about this seven piece print project that I started designing where each piece represented a day of creation but it never manifested 😭
August 17, 2025 at 5:51 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
Marina Rustow’s “Heresy and the Politics of Community” (pp. 22-23 here) discusses the competition between Palestinian and Babylonian “rites” and that there continued to be Jews dedicated to Palestinian rabbinic traditions well into the Middle Ages
Page 22 of Rustow’s monograph, stating,”There was, then, no final Babylonian triumph during the gaonic period. To look for one is to write history backwards— to use present monopolies to limit our interpretation of a past full of contingencies. It may be more fruitful to see the question of when the Babylonian construction of Judaism triumphed throughout the Jewish world as having either many answers or none. It triumphed in the twelfth century, when the rabbinic authorities of Christian Europe memorialized the Iraqi ge'onim as the authentic links in a chain connecting them with the rabbis of late antiquity. It triumphed again in the thirteenth century when the Tosafist commentators of northern France and Germany wrote a vast set of commentaries in which, among other things, they attempted to reconcile local Jewish customs with the text of the Babylonian Talmud and thus bring Jewish practice closer to the talmudic text. One cannot really say that it triumphed at the first public Talmud disputation in Paris in 1240—it lost, and cartloads of manuscripts were publicly burned as a result—but it is no accident that church and state authorities began to put the Talmud on trial only then, as it became central to the practice of Judaism. It triumphed again in 1523 when the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg of Venice published the …” Page 23 of Rustow’s monograph, which states, “… editio princeps, which allowed the Babylonian Talmud to circulate among an exponentially greater number of readers, accompanied by the commentaries of both Rashi and the Tosafists; but in the same year, the Bomberg atelier also produced the editio princeps of the Palestinian Talmud. And it triumphed again in the twentieth century, when greater literacy and increased access to traditional Jewish texts entered the educational lives of observant Jews on an unprecedented scale, particularly, in the last third of the twentieth century, the lives of a large segment of Jews who had hitherto almost never studied the Talmud: women. And so the question of the triumph of the Babylonian Talmud and of rabbinic authority in general continues to hold a kind of exaggerated fascination for the modern age, in which printing and mass literacy have made the Babylonian Talmud even more widely known among observant Jews than it was in the Middle Ages.”
August 11, 2025 at 2:38 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
I’m mad that my platonic ideal for a velociraptor is stuck on the Deinonychus they used for Jurassic Park and not this beautiful creature
A picture of what a velociraptor would have looked like. It’s 2 feet tall and has wings and feathers
August 10, 2025 at 8:04 AM
chancepmh.bsky.social
The mikveh sans mein Ehemann
August 6, 2025 at 12:27 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
At the Mikveh in Speyer (one of the many sneak shots of my husband).
A picture of my husband looking at the mikveh in Speyer
August 6, 2025 at 12:20 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
It looks like the tweets are now deleted but some Germans (a journalist in this case) will really say the most unhinged and racist things all in the name of claiming to fight antisemitism
A tweet in German by Tobias Huch that states, “Nachdem wir in den letzten Tagen so viele Kinder mit Erbkrankheiten in #Gaza gesehen haben, für deren genetische Erkrankungen #Israel nicht verantwortlich ist, sollten wir vielleicht mal den Menschen in Gaza erklären, dass man nicht mit seinem Cousin oder seiner Cousine ersten Grades oder allgemein Verwandten heiraten sollte. Auch wenn das angeblich Mohammed (der "Prophet") gemacht haben soll. Das ist der u.a. der Grund für die vielen kranken Kinder. Hinzu kommt, dass solche Cousin-Ehen für einen niedrigeren IQ (zwischen 5 und 13 Punkten) sorgt, die Kindersterblichkeit bis zu 50% höher ist und es zu körperlichen Fehlbildungen kommt.” A translated tweet by Tobias Huch that states, “After seeing so many children with hereditary diseases in #Gaza in recent days, for which #Israel is not responsible, perhaps we should explain to the people in Gaza that one should not marry their first cousin or relatives in general. Even if Mohammed (the "Prophet") is said to have done so. This is, among other things, the reason for the many sick children. In addition, such cousin marriages lead to a lower IQ (between 5 and 13 points), child mortality is up to 50% higher, and it results in physical deformities.”
July 29, 2025 at 3:33 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
A headline from the onion that states “protestors urged not to give trump administration pretext for what it already doing”
June 12, 2025 at 5:18 PM
chancepmh.bsky.social
The repost immediately following is pretty ironic. Maybe there’s no way you can appease racists and so we have to drop this façade about optics, which is ultimately rooted in notions of electability. At a certain point, maybe people need to just start focusing on doing what they think is right.
June 9, 2025 at 5:16 PM