Like many Jews of her generation, she resents the use of the Holocaust and creation of the State of Israel as moral blackmail against the attractions of assimilation or against questioning old certainties. Schemes such as the March of the Living evidently strike her as manipulative. These are subsidised tours mainly for Jewish teenagers who visit Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day and then proceed to Israel. A Polish Jewish friend of the author who went on the March of the Living felt humiliated that the scheme ignored the small surviving Jewish community in Poland itself. In fact, the scheme has subsequently extended its programme specifically to include the present-day Polish Jewry.  Shore makes considerable efforts to understand those surviving Polish Jews who, after the Second World War, served in the brutal Communist security apparatus, feeling that they are a disturbing part of modern history which conveniently tends to be underplayed in Jewish versions. If Jews are proud that Sigmund Freud was a member of the tribe, they should face up to the fact that so too was Jakub Berman, head of Poland's postwar Communist security apparatus. A contrasting interpretation is that the importance and prevalence of the Jewish Bolshevik tends to be exaggerated by many in Central Europe. 

Though Shore is untypical in the depth of her knowledge of Central Europe, she expresses concerns which are fairly widespread among younger Jews for whom the Holocaust is less immediate. She needs to be taken seriously and sympathetically. This is particularly because she describes her travels and expresses her feelings so openly and engagingly. 

In order fully to understand the author's position, readers should also look at her journalism. For instance, it was in Sh'ma in 2011, after the birth of her first child, that she expressed most forcefully her dissatisfaction with Jewish communal life. ("Growing up, I'd always felt an aversion toward the suburban Jewish community my parents belonged to; the community felt bourgeois less in Marx's sense than in Rousseau's: the bourgeoisie as superficiality, snobbery, pretentiousness.") Her article in the New York Times on the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising attracted considerable ire for its criticism of the Israeli establishment which, she argues, had written the      anti-Zionist, Bundist resistance leader Marek Edelman out of the historical script. Her comments were partly justified but were exaggerated. Whereas Edelman received an honorary doctorate in 1989 from Yale, no similar honour was forthcoming from any Israeli university. Edelman became a champion of Palestinian rights though he opposed anti-Israeli terrorism. Nevertheless, though denied within Israel the honour they greatly merited, Edelman and other Bundist members of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising have been by no means "forgotten" there, as Shore suggests. The websites of Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters' House contradict her contention.