Chapter 2 focuses on what Ilf and Petrov astutely identified as the American strategy of disparaging communism by associating it with ethnic and racial minorities. Focusing on the story of Alexander Gumberg, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian empire who helped to facilitate Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the chapter analyzes how in the wake of the post-World War I Red Scare, Jewish immigrants negotiated the popular and official tendency to conflate “alienism” and “radicalism.”