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This chapter introduces an elementary theory of C^*-algebras in the context of Bishop-style constructive mathematics. It givens proof of the Gelfand-Naĭmark-Segal (GNS) construction theorem in Bishop's constructive mathematics. This important theorem in the theory of operator algebras says that for each C^*-algebra and every state, there exists a cyclic representation on some Hilbert space. This chapter's contribution is of particular interest in view of the Bridges-Hellman debate on whether constructive mathematics is able to cope with quantum mechanics. Since quantum mechanics is bound up with the theory of operator algebras on Hilbert spaces, a constructive treatment of the latter has been a challenge for constructive mathematics from the very beginning.

Lucy Mancini, “thoroughly Americanized by three years of college,” achieves freedom, though she must first, in fairy-tale fashion, rid herself of the bodily defect, a pelvic malformation, that presumably issues from the genes of her Sicilian family, and that functions as a metaphor for her transit from Sonny's puttana (whore) to a Jewish doctor's wife. The exception to the vita matrimoniale italiana (marriage Italian-style) is Lucy Mancini, who not surprisingly crosses cultural borders to marry Jules Segal. Lucy Mancini's affair with and subsequent marriage to Dr. Jules Segal unites the Italians and Jews in the city of the future, Las Vegas.

This chapter defends an analysis of definite descriptions according to which they express a presupposition of existence and a conventional implicature of uniqueness. It replies to analyses offered by Szabó (2000) and Ludlow & Segal (2004), according to which definite descriptions semantically encode familiarity and give rise to a conversational implicature of uniqueness. Evidence is provided that the familiarity implicature is cancelable and calculable, unlike the (conventional) implicature of uniqueness, and is thus conversational. Descriptions with stressed the either contrast uniqueness with non-uniqueness or express a hyperbolic extension of uniqueness such as importance or prominence. Two counterarguments of Szabó and Ludlow and Segal, involving kinds of determiner meanings in languages of the world and the definiteness effect in existential sentences, are briefly replied to.

Alan Segal outlines the history of binitarianism and the criticism it met within Hellenistic Jewish culture. Segal begins by identifying ‘those who say there are two powers in heaven’, a rabbinic heresy probably referring to Christians. He shows that Philo did not hesitate to call the logos a ‘second God’ because he felt it was more important to protect the immutability than the unity of God. The arguments, in turn, became the basis for Justin's christology and from there entered Christian discussions of the nature of the Trinity. At the same time, rabbinic opposition to all such notions, whether philosophical or Christian or both, intensified.

Alan Segal starts by observing that incarnation is not an easy category to fit into native Jewish categories for talking about God. Casting around for adequate precedents, he first examines Plato's conceptions of matter and spirit (along with mortality and immortality). Philo was to use Platonic thought and vocabulary significantly, although he did not breach the line between spiritual and material objects. Philo looked askance at incarnation. Segal then recalls various angelic theophanies and mediation scenes, in which precedents for the Christian conception of incarnation seem better grounded in Jewish literature.

Judah Benzion Segal (1912–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a long career as a teacher of Semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Segal’s principal interest was in Aramaic and Syriac, in addition to Hebrew and the other main Semitic tongues. Before his teaching career, he was employed in the Sudan Civil Service and, during World War II, his service was frequently behind the enemy lines in North Africa. He was educated at Magdalen College School, University of Oxford, and at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. One of Segal’s other abiding interests concerned the Jews of Cochin whose history he published in 1993. But it will probably be in the area of Aramaic studies that Segal will be best remembered in the academic world.

This chapter addresses film translation into Hebrew in Mandatory Palestine, from the 1920s to the 1940s, when silent films were gradually replaced by talkies and the need for translation increased. It combines ‘macro history’ with ‘micro history’, the study of history through primary sources. Its main primary sources are the autobiographies of two pioneering translators, Ya’akov Davidon and Yerushalayim Segal, who specialised in dubbing and subtitling, respectively. While local production at that time served Zionist ideology, the main function of foreign films was to provide entertainment. Film translators faced two obstacles: official British censorship and the objection on the part of some sectors of Jewish society to the screening of films in foreign languages, considered a threat to Hebrew. Despite these obstacles, translators had the freedom to import, invent, and experiment with new technologies, and to adapt not just the translation to the film, but also the film to the translation.

I Married an Angel — “With 50 Lovely Dancing Angels” — opened at the Shubert Theatre in New York on May 1938. To Richard Rodgers, it seemed the show was dying on its feet: the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy skit didn't work; Vivienne Segal's soaring soprano was muted by a heavy cold; the laughs were few and far between, the applause perfunctory. He left the theatre convinced the show had flopped. He could not have been more wrong. The critics raved, notably Brooks Atkinson, who declared, “Musical comedy has met its masters, and they have reared back and passed a Forty-fourth Street miracle.” Josh Logan recalled how they all rushed about gleefully quoting that one at each other: all, that is, except Lorenz Hart, who refused to believe Atkinson meant what he had said.

Lorenz Hart called at his brother's apartment and delivered a dozen tickets for the night's premiere to be distributed to friends. Just the night before, he had telephoned Dorothy Hart to ask her to buy a gold cigarette case for Herbert Fields and something special for Vivienne Segal. When he arrived at Teddy Hart's he was already on his way to not being sober, which was not good news; he would be smashed by curtain-up. They knew, and Lorenz probably knew, too, that Richard Rodgers had given orders to the stage manager to have him removed from the theater if he became difficult. The signs were they were in for a bad night. Later they learned Hart's heart had stopped twice and was restarted after emergency treatment. He lapsed into a coma. George Ford said last thing Hart said to the nurse was, “What have I lived for?” Then, he was gone.

The concluding section of the book emphasizes the shift of paradigm from modernism to postmodernism as a way of contextualizing Terry Eagleton’s tragic theory. It suggests that the Dionysiac turn characterizing adaptations of Greek tragedy from the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, rather than being an intellectual game, in fact questions the power relations embedded in the modern reception of tragedy, while also expanding the definitions and frames established by canonical representations.

The flip side of destruction is creation, allegedly. This chapter sets out to see if the two are really so different, and whether the nature of creativity doesn't also fall within the death-drive's compass. Freud's writings on art and literature argue that creative works are the disguises worn by wishes that have been repressed, threads to guide us through the maze of the artist's mind back to its creative source. But so too, according to Freud, are less palatable phenomena such as obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Yet Freud balks again at making the connection, or at least he will not make it explicit, so this chapter imagines he had. The chapter uses Freudian logic against Freud, so to speak, reasoning that creative acts, stemming as they do from the unconscious, cannot be separated so hygienically from those more rebarbative endeavours that lead not to creation but to its supposed opposite. Creativity is ‘determined’ by the death-drive, where the death-drive is obsessive, compulsive, repetitive, undeviating, monomaniacal, and so forth. Because of its own emphasis on repetitive, fixated love, the starting example is Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love, and from that the chapter goes on to explore competing concepts of creativity, not just from clinical psychoanalysis (Hanna Segal and Christopher Bollas) but in the work of critics such as Nietzsche and Leo Bersani. It shows that, throughout these interventions, ‘creativity’ never quite succeeds in slipping the shadow of death.

Rather than being aimed at family filmgoers generally, Hollywood Verne adaptations began to polarize around either adults or preteens in the later 1960s. A bifurcation emerged as Verne became a name attracting not only children but also mature filmgoers as he emerged as an author for adult consideration. The Verne cycle evolved in approach and function, embracing the ethos of an age of social and generational transformation. A certain exhaustion of the existing trend became evident as filmmakers, in the search for fresh perspectives, turned away from adaptations toward pastiche and satire of the author’s stories, using characters, icons, and vehicles in narratives and contexts outside of those the author created. New variations on his ideas or futuristic elements beyond Verne’s vision or intent developed, while still retaining canonical elements, plot structures, and thematic motifs. This was also the rationale allowing for a series format in several Vernian animated television presentations, and the first Verne television series would demonstrate this form as a viable style for bringing Verne to the screen.

This chapter examines Her First American (1985) by Lore Segal, a novel about a young Jewish war refugee and her romance with a cosmopolitan African American journalist in the 1950s. The two characters have deep-seated but asymmetrical experiences with dislocation, racial persecution, and American alienation. However, the novel quite literally elides their similarities and all other forms of political recognition, leaving gaps in the relationship and in the plot. These elisions seem symptomatic of a problem of political recognition itself, where political names are necessary for democratic recognition, on the one hand, but end up as straightjacketing “identities,” on the other. The chapter also reads the memoir of prominent sociologist and journalist Horace Cayton, Long Old Road (1965), in tandem with Segal's novel to trace the fine line between effacing race and defacing the self through racial abnegation.

This chapter follows the earlier one in this section on female migrant domestic work but covers the period from 1945 to the present. It explores how refugee domestic servants were remembered in British culture and how they themselves wrote and re-wrote their experiences at different key points after the war and how their autobiographical writings were received. Particular attention is given to Lore Segal’s work and her description of her parents’ experiences as refugee domestics. The greater interest in the refugee domestics coming out of the social history movement and oral testimony projects is highlighted and how the greater interest in the Holocaust increasingly became the context in which these experiences were placed. The chapter concludes by exploring the lives of recent migrant domestic workers across the world and the similarities and differences in their experiences, including the communication of them and the whether they were/are a form of slavery.

Pal Joey features four female character archetypes: the shrewd, wealthy woman of taste; the sleazy nightclub chorine; the innocent ingénue; and the hard-boiled reporter. All four of these types had appeared on Broadway (and in film) before. In Pal Joey two of them—the ingénue, Linda, and the nightclub singer, Gladys—are parodies. Linda serves as a foil to the typical ingénue trope, and doesn’t develop as a character. Gladys is a stereotype, albeit a funny one, of the tough-talking nightclub chanteuse. Vera is, truly, the only female character in Pal Joey to be afforded a complex inner life. The character Melba, however, offers the audience shrewd commentary on the conventions that Pal Joey sends up. This chapter looks specifically at the character Vera, played by Vivienne Segal, and the song “Zip,” sung by the character Melba and performed by Jean Casto and Elaine Stritch.