There wasn’t quite enough champagne to go around, “so those who are standing closest to me will get some,” Menaker said, “pa blatoo”—a reference to blat, the complex network of connections and favors that governed the trade of precious consumer goods in the Soviet Union. Staples could be bought in stores, but anything desirable was scarce. Friendliness with the butcher could get you a nice cut of meat; the baker would make your birthday cake in exchange for perfume for his wife.

Those brushes with communism’s downsides prompted Menaker and many of her friends to embrace capitalism with a rabid intensity. “Socialism is a conspiracy of losers against achievers,” Menaker said. “America is the only country where you can come naked with no language and make it in 25 years.”

Many Russian immigrants work in the tech industry, according to Kliger, since math and engineering were popular college majors among Jews in Russia. They arrived in Silicon Valley just as personal computing was taking off, and some made small fortunes that they are not keen to redistribute. They get their news primarily from conservative sources—Fox News and the Drudge Report were popular go-tos among the party-goers. Nadia Shkolnikov, the birthday girl, said she “listens to Rush Limbaugh to relax.”

Many of them are torn between Cruz and Trump. “Cruz, I like that he’s conservative,” said Shkolnikov. “But what is not appealing to me is that he sounds like he’s preaching all the time. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish, but I don’t like when Christians are preaching too much.”

About Trump, she says, “I don’t like his personality, but I like all his ideas.”

Her husband, a software engineer named Val, considers himself a strong Trump supporter.

“He’s a successful businessman,” he said. “He’ll be able to work with people. Plus, a guy who’s not a politician won’t be able to promulgate big government for its own sake.”

Russian Jews in America value hard work and overcoming adversity, said Evgeny Finkel, a political science professor at George Washington University, who is of Ukrainian Jewish descent. “They worked hard and succeeded, back there in the USSR and especially here in the US. [In their minds], if others don't succeed it is because they don't want to, not because of structural problems.”

I suggested to Menaker’s guests that even the most extreme of Sanders’ proposals—to make America resemble a Scandinavian country—is not quite as radical workers rising up to seize the means of production.

The Russians didn’t buy it. There’s no need for America to become more like Finland or France, they said. “They think Finland is just America with free medical care. Finland is good for people who are on welfare for a long time,” Nadia Shkolnikov said. “Not if you want to rise up.”

That brought about a discussion of Obamacare and single-payer healthcare. Specifically, how bad they consider it to be for providers. The saying in the Soviet Union was that a doctor who worked one shift had nothing to eat, and one who worked two shifts didn’t have the time to.