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A jingle inspired a show about dueling lawyers. Two synagogues helped bring it back to the stage.
(New York Jewish Week) — For any New Yorker, the background noise of the 2000s may well have been marked by the numbers 800-888-8888, the ubiquitous jingle for the Buffalo-based personal injury law firm Cellino and Barnes.
The renown of Ross Cellino and Stephen Barnes grew even more when the pair contentiously split up in 2017. Their acrimonious business divorce included clashes over managing the business, a restraining order against Cellino, claims of “bullying” by Barnes and a complaint that Barnes refused to let Cellino hire his own daughter.
Naturally, comedy writers Michael Breen and David Rafailedes needed to write a show about what might have gone down, including a scene about how that infamous jingle came into existence.
Breen and Rafailedes had performed the show, “Cellino v. Barnes,” a handful of times in New York in 2020 before the pandemic shut it down. Breen moved to California and Rafailedes headed to grad school and the play they wrote about a unique New York sensation almost faded into the ether.
But this isn’t that story. This is the story of how two 25-year-old high school buddies and amateur theater producers made sure that didn’t happen — and how they leaned on their synagogues to get the job done.
David Pochapin and Cameron Koffman were 22 when they saw “Cellino v. Barnes.” They loved the show for the way it spoke to their sense of humor, their New York childhoods and their love of niche theater. The pair would eventually take on the task of producing the play and teaming up with Breen and Rafailedes to bring it to a wider audience, this time in a vacant office space in Manhattan to really give audiences the feeling of authenticity.
Now 25 and a year into producing “Cellino v. Barnes: The Play,” Pochapin and Koffman are admittedly amateurs — Pochapin works a day job in FinTech and Koffman in city government.
“When we are trying to get people to come see the show, we say, ‘we’re doing this not because we saw a business opportunity but because we genuinely saw a story that more people needed to see,’” Pochapin said. “It’s hard to imagine finding another project quite like this. It’s been a wild ride and we’re super excited for the show.”
(On Oct. 2, 2020, Stephen Barnes and his niece were killed in the crash of a private plane in upstate New York. Pochapin said there is “absolutely no comedy about the plane crash” and the show centers around the creation, success and break-up of the firm.)
Ahead of the show’s opening, the New York Jewish Week spoke to Koffman and Pochapin about why they love the show, how their synagogues and Jewish communities have supported them in this process and what changes they are most excited about.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: How did you get involved as producers with the show?
Cameron Koffman: We first saw the show in January of 2020. We had no involvement — we had just seen an article from the Buffalo News: “Show about Cellino and Barnes is an 8.8888 out of 10.” It sounded fun and it was playing in New York City for just a couple shows in January at the Bell House in Gowanus. It was the absolute funniest thing. Then COVID hit, obviously, six, seven weeks later, and life moved on.
I got an email from the venue that the show was back for two performances in August of 2021. David and I dragged more of our friends. It was a big group activity because we had been talking about the show for a year and a half at this point. I mean, it’s Cellino and Barnes, iconic New York names and a jingle that everybody recognizes. We saw it again and it was even funnier.
We had a mutual friend with one of the actors and pushed to get a drink because we just really wanted to tell them, “We thought the play was so funny. It was so great that someone wanted to tell this story.” When we met up with him, we asked if he ever had aspirations to make a permanent run out of it. He said yes, but COVID happened, he ended up having a kid and the other co-writer and actor moved out to the West Coast. Basically, life got in the way. When we talked to [Breen and Rafailedes], it really just sounded like more than anything they needed people to help initiate the process, which we thought we would be able to handle.
We certainly didn’t have experience in production, but we were so passionate about the story and we like to get our hands dirty with logistics. We just thought it was so fun that we wanted to take it to another level and really create a full run of this. We put our heads down, worked on a proposal and here we are.
How did your Jewish communities step in to help get the show back on its feet again?
DP: When we first got into this, which was over a year ago now, we talked to everyone we could, every person that would hear us out and offer an opinion. We reached out to people at my synagogue and they offered to provide chairs for the audience and books for the set, so now we have chairs and books. We’re both very involved in our synagogues — mine is Sutton Place Synagogue and Cameron’s is Temple Emanu-El. My first exposure to theater at a young age was not only in school, but during the Purim spiels at my synagogue. It is because of our communities and our upbringing there that we have the confidence that we’ll be able to do this.
CK: It really is. So many people that we know, that we rely on, that we talk to and the time that we spend with them have helped us put this show together. For example, I lead a couple of lay-led groups at Temple Emanu-El. Through that, I’ve become friendly with dozens of people, I’ve met other people through the young members circle, through becoming friendly with the rabbi and actually leading Shabbat once last year. So — for both of us — one of the main reasons we knew we could do this was because we’re deeply embedded in a large Jewish community and we knew that we could tap into people that would be able to sort of help and guide us with advice and knowledge along the way. Also, we knew we’d be able to blast out the show to a lot of people. David could tell you, one of the first people to buy a ticket for the play was the rabbi [Rachel Ain] from Sutton Place Synagogue, she and her whole family.
As producers you have a little more control than you did as audience members. What changes are you most excited about since the first production?
CK: Not much had to change about the story. Breen and Rafailedes had done the play and certainly the story of Cellino and Barnes is still ever present in the cultural milieu of today. For a large swath of people, millions of people in the New York area, and even in California, where Cellino and Barnes worked too, that jingle just rings a bell and it seared itself into our brains, so our vision didn’t have to be focused on making sure there was name recognition.
When we saw it at The Bell House, the show was very bare bones. The venue had a stage, but it’s a big hall with 200-250 seats and you don’t really feel like you’re at a theater venue — you certainly don’t feel like you’re at an experiential venue. The space that we got on West 23rd is a vacant commercial space that feels like you’re actually in a law office. That was one of the key things we brought — we thought, “if we’re going to really lean on the vibe and the aura of Cellino and Barnes, we want to make you feel like you’re stepping into a dingy personal injury attorney’s office, with plaques on the wall and all of it.”
Why should people see it?
CK: I’m deeply passionate about my love for New York. A couple years ago, right out of college, I actually ran for the New York State Legislature. I love the city. It’s just such an amazing place. Cellino and Barnes is very much a part of New York’s cultural fabric. There are just certain things that resonate with all New Yorkers. It’s Roscoe the bedbug dog from Bell Environmental, it’s Sandy Kenyon from the Eyewitness News “movie minute” in the back of the taxi cab. All those sorts of things that people who grew up in New York or who have spent significant time here will know and recognize.
So many people come from different backgrounds, but there are still these unifiers — everybody’s seen the billboards and subway ads. And although it is a very New York production, we do think that it can resonate with everybody. Every city seems to have their own version of Cellino and Barnes — the mysterious personal injury lawyer who’s on every billboard, on every bus, and who has their slogan.
DP: When you’re in the theater and you’re laughing at these two people that are so nostalgic and are two of the easiest people to laugh and make jokes about, it’s just an unforgettable night. It’s hilarious, and even though it’s a comedy it also makes you think. Cameron and I have had several discussions about who’s right or wrong and Team Cellino or Team Barnes.
“Cellino v. Barnes: The Play” opens on April 13 at 320 W 23rd St. Tickets start at $40.
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The post A jingle inspired a show about dueling lawyers. Two synagogues helped bring it back to the stage. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
The post Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab appeared first on The Forward.
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An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English
(JTA) — Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the killing of more than 50,000 Jews, was sitting in a cell in Warsaw awaiting his own execution.
Before he met the gallows, Stroop described in unrepentant detail his ascent as a Nazi, his destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and his daily prosecution of mass murder. He gave his account to Kazimierz Moczarski, the journalist, Polish resistance leader and veteran of the Warsaw Uprising who shared Stroop’s cell in Mokotów Prison for 255 days in 1949.
Though he is now remembered as a hero for fighting the Nazi occupation, Moczarski was villainized by Poland’s postwar Communist regime, which viewed his resistance group as a threat to their monopoly on power. His unlikely imprisonment alongside a former Nazi officer he’d once tried to assassinate gave Moczarski the chance to document Stroop’s confessions in an influential book, “Conversations with an Executioner.”
This book, despite being censored for years by the Polish government, proved revelatory about the psychology and motivations behind Nazi ideology. After decades of being translated into over 15 languages and adapted for the stage and screen, “Conversations with an Executioner” was published Tuesday for the first time in an uncensored English translation by Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press.
The book’s champions say it’s about time.
“On the one hand, this book is a central historical source for this really important event in the modern history of the world,” Sean Casper Bye, the book’s English translator, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And at the same time, it’s one that has continually struggled to get fully into publication.”
The book’s revelations about Stroop, the rise of Nazism and the psychology of genocide is reaching English readers after a long deferral. Moczarski made many unsuccessful attempts to publish “Conversations with an Executioner” after his release, but found little interest from publishers in Communist Poland.
The book did not align with Communist ideological narratives about the Holocaust, which deemphasized tragedy in favor of total victory over the Nazis. And the government’s crackdown on Polish resistance members — which led to Moczarski’s imprisonment with Stroop — remained a taboo subject.
A serialized version of the book first appeared in the Polish magazine Odra from 1972 to 1974, and Moczarski died the following year at age 68. He never saw the first censored edition in 1977, which removed references to the reasons behind his own incarceration. Nor did he see the publication of “Conversations with an Executioner” as an uncensored book in 1992, after the fall of Communism, when it became a bestseller.
Now, the book has “canonical status” in Poland, said Bye. It has been included for years on required school reading lists, shaping how generations of Polish people remember the Holocaust.
Moczarski’s account also faced an uphill battle to reach English readers. During the Cold War, censorship, disrupted communication and closed archives in Eastern Europe made it difficult to publish books from Poland in English, said Bye. That lowered the focus on Eastern European sources and languages for years in Holocaust scholarship across English-speaking countries.
The new English translation was championed by Clare Bullock, the book’s editor in the United Kingdom, who has Polish Jewish heritage. She spent years pushing for it to appear in English at multiple publishing houses, said Bye.
Moczarski and Stroop’s fates were intertwined long before they shared a cell. During World War II, Moczarski joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance force, where he worked for the Office of Information and Propaganda.
Identifying local Nazi officials and collaborators as targets, Moczarski and his associates assassinated Stroop’s predecessor, Franz Kutschera, nicknamed the “Butcher of Warsaw” for his mass executions of Polish civilians. They also made a failed attempt to kill Stroop, detailed by Moczarski in their cell.
Though he was not Jewish, Moczarski supported and liaised with the Jewish Fighting Organization, known in Polish as ŻOB. The Home Army provided ŻOB leaders with weapons and technical instructions for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis.
A year later, Moczarski fought in the Home Army’s citywide Warsaw Uprising. The Nazis also brutally crushed this revolt, which led to the deaths of over 160,000 Poles, including some 17,000 Polish Jews who took part in the fighting or were discovered in hiding.
Instead of being rewarded after the war, Moczarski was arrested in 1945 as the Communists consolidated their power in the aftermath of Nazi rule. The new regime baselessly declared the Home Army a quasi-fascist organization, claiming they had collaborated with the Nazis rather than fighting against them. Moczarski spent 11 years in prison, where, he would later recount, he endured 49 methods of torture.
His confinement with Stroop made for another form of torture, according to Bye, who said it was “symbolically equating him, a brave Polish patriot, with a Nazi war criminal.”
The men had a third cellmate: Gustav Schielke, a German former policeman turned low-ranking SS officer who resented the police’s subordination to the Nazis, but did not resist them. In prison, these enemies lived under a code that required equality and confidentiality for survival. They slept on the floor together on three pallets, and Moczarski spent nights huddled between Stroop and Schielke to stay warm.
Moczarski made it his mission to understand the war criminals.
“If I succeed, I have the chance — if only to a certain extent — to answer my own question,” he wrote. “What historical, psychological, sociological mechanism led some Germans to come together into a gang of mass murderers who governed the Reich and did their utmost to introduce their ‘Ordnung’ — their Order — in Europe and the world?”
He unraveled in Stroop an average German middle-class man of his time, with a low level of education, a drive to rise through military ranks, a reverence for order and obedience and a penchant for parroting Nazi ideology.
As his defenses wore down, Stroop gave Moczarski a day-by-day account of his orders to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Over nearly a month, his forces battled Jewish guerilla fighters and eventually burned down the ghetto block by block. He referred to the operations as “neutralizing” Jews or “cleansing” the Warsaw Ghetto of “subhumans.”
When Moczarski asked Stroop whether he pitied the women fighters whom he captured and killed, he said the commander responded, after a long and “worked up” silence, with Nazi clichés.
“Finally, the general straightens up, smooths down the hair at his temples and replies, in a chanting rhythm,” Moczarski wrote. “‘Anyone wishing to be a true man in those days, meaning a strong one, had to act as I did. Gelobt sei was hart macht!’” The German phrase by Nietzsche, meaning “Praised be what hardens,” was taken from Nazi propaganda.
In this portrait of Stroop, Bye saw a man who was motivated primarily by moving up the Nazi Party hierarchy. While Stroop repeated Nazi tropes and adapted his beliefs accordingly — upon becoming an SS officer, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself “Gottgläubig,” a Nazi religious term — much of his testimony amounted to a boastful account of personal victories.
“This was a type of Nazi,” said Bye. “Not everybody was a completely 100% committed idealogue. There were lots of people who were just ambitious and unscrupulous, and that was part of the engine that kept the Nazi machine going.”
The idea that the Holocaust could have been willingly committed by everyday, career-minded people, not just Nazi ideologues and sadists, has been echoed in other landmark works of scholarship and culture, from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 “Eichmann in Jerusalem” to the 2023 film “The Zone of Interest.”
“Conversations with an Executioner” has been challenged as an authentic document, since Moczarski had no materials to take notes in the cell, yet recounted years of dialogue in vivid detail. Moczarski claimed that he honed an exceptional memory in prison and could write the book in his mind. After being released in 1956, he verified facts by obtaining Stroop’s reports from the Polish Commission for Researching Nazi War Crimes and information from the U.S. Pentagon archives.
The limitations of the book as a firsthand account also make it a precious resource, said Bye. Stroop’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was so effective that “Conversations with an Executioner” provided a rare surviving window into what occurred.
Bye said that voices like Moczarski’s are becoming ever more crucial as the last generation of survivors die out and the Holocaust fades from living memory. He hopes the new English translation will give readers a counterweight to current-day narratives about the Holocaust, emerging in politics and elsewhere, that mold the past to fit ideological messages.
“There are so many people who have a vested interest in getting us to look at the Holocaust in a particular way, who want to instrumentalize the Holocaust as this hugely emotionally weighty event for their own purposes,” he said. “One of the ways that we can keep in touch with the reality of the Holocaust is by going back to primary sources like this — going back to the people who did see it with their own eyes and who wrote about it themselves.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic
(JTA) — AIPAC and its allies have poured millions of dollars into a California special election, transforming a race between two Democrats into a battleground over the pro-Israel group’s place in Democratic politics.
The spending in the Bay Area’s 14th congressional district is aimed at boosting Melissa Hernandez, a moderate Democrat and president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board, over Aisha Wahab, a progressive state senator who supports ending U.S. military aid to Israel.
Wahab replied “yes” during an April debate when asked whether Israel’s war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In contrast, Hernandez declined to give a yes-or-no answer, instead saying that Israel had a right to defend itself following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but that the “destruction into Gaza has gone too far.”
Wahab remains the favorite heading into Tuesday’s election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, a reliable supporter of Israel in Congress who resigned in April amid sexual misconduct allegations that he has denied. Wahab finished ahead of Hernandez in the election’s June 16 special primary, receiving 42.8% of the vote compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%.
The United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s main super PAC, has poured close to $2.5 million into boosting Hernandez and attacking Wahab this election cycle, while Bold America, another group that has received funding from the United Democracy Project, has spent roughly $1.8 million, according to The Hill.
When asked about the AIPAC spending in the race by the Pleasanton Weekly, Hernandez replied, “I have no say over independent expenditures. That is the law, and I see them when you do.” She added: “I have thousands of donors and not one of them sets my agenda.”
But while the Bay Area race has become one of the the latest focuses of the pro-Israel lobby, following a costly defeat by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Israel has hardly been a defining issue in the contest, and Wahab has not neatly fit the mold of other progressive candidates the group has targeted this election cycle.
Wahab, who is the child of Afghan refugees, has centered her campaign on affordability issues and civil rights. While her campaign website calls for “No More Wars!” it does not specifically reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Citing the civilian toll in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, her site reads, “We cannot bomb our way to lasting peace.”
Hernandez, who previously served as the mayor of Dublin, California, has focused her campaign on lowering costs and her commitments to fighting crime and increasing public safety.
Wahab, 39, has drawn endorsements from a host of labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. Hernandez, 51, meanwhile, has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
During a Thursday appearance on the livestream of Hasan Piker, who has faced accusations of antisemitism, Wahab said that she would have voted for the Stop the Bombs Act and supported ending all U.S. aid to Israel, though she stipulated that “humanitarian aid is important to me too.”
During the livestream, Wahab also touted a September 2025 resolution she co-authored with Jewish state Senator Scott Wiener, which called for the “end to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.” The resolution was also signed by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
In 2021, Wahab also collaborated with local Jewish leaders on a fundraiser for Afghan refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from the country.
“I work well with the Jewish community. I’m very proud to support them. They’re my constituents,” Wahab said on the livestream.
“As an Afghan, you know, I really deeply want to ensure that all people feel welcomed and safe and secure in this nation. And we know that there’s a rise in antisemitism. We know all of that,” Wahab continued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize a foreign nation. You can’t criticize their leadership.”
Wahab attributed the volume of AIPAC spending in the race to “pure racism and prejudice,” saying that her “Jewish Senate colleagues are literally confused as to why they are spending this much money against me.”
As Wahab pushes back on the attack ads, she has also garnered $200,000 in support from American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC that formed as a counterweight to AIPAC.
The liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street Action Fund also announced Thursday that it was spending $100,000 to support Wahab.
Tali deGroot, the group’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said in a statement that AIPAC’s spending against her marked another “cynical attempt” to “defeat a candidate who won’t rubber-stamp their agenda.”
“AIPAC’s super PAC has failed time and again this cycle, and we expect this latest attempt to take Republican billionaire dollars and buy a Democratic primary to fail as well,” said deGroot. “Voters in the 14th deserve better, and they deserve a Member of Congress who will bring the kind of clear-eyed, nuanced and compassionate leadership that Dr. Wahab has shown throughout her career.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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