The scene in which Sam and Marion learn about their DNA results and are presented with a book detailing their genealogy is a close reference to Henry Louis Gates's pop-genealogy show Finding Your Roots. In her real life, Pamela Adlon (Sam) appeared on a season 8 episode of Finding Your Roots, where she discovered some family secrets that are reflected in this episode's story-line: as Sam and Marion do, Adlon learned that she had a cousin, Clara Berman, who married a non-Jewish Ukranian, Anatoly, and had two children, Vladimir and Ludmilla. When Anatoly was called for military service, he left them with his mother for safekeeping, but when the German army invaded, Anatoly's mother turned in Clara and the two children to the Nazis, who murdered them.