Byline: Batya Ungar-Sargon

On Feb. 18, Bloomberg News published an article with the headline "Bloomberg Campaign Says It's a Two-Man Race for the Nomination." Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted the link with the caption, "It's almost as if he owns the media." Cruz was trying to point out that the flattering headline appeared in an outlet that former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg owns, rendering its judgment suspect. But in replacing a demonstrative pronoun ("this media") with a definite article ("the media"), Cruz skidded from a true statement (Mike Bloomberg does own Bloomberg News) into an old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews controlling the - or really all - media.

It might have seemed like a harbinger of what's to come: This Democratic primary contest is, after all, a historic race for American Jews. The other man in the "Two-Man Race for the Nomination" is Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., an avowed socialist and another Jew, who looks like the front-runner after winning three primaries, itself a historic feat for a Jewish candidate. The faceoff between the Jewish billionaire and the Jewish socialist is the most Jewish political moment in American history, and predictionshaveabounded that a wave of hatred is about to hit as the two gain steam, evoking mythological anti-Semitic creatures to rapacious anti-Semites: The Elder of Zion and the Judeo-Bolshevik in a race for control of America! The Daily Stormer headlines write themselves.

I'm not as worried. To me, Cruz's infelicitous tweet read like the kind of unfortunate mistake you make when you forget someone is Jewish, rather than when you target them for it. While Jews may see two 78-year-old Jewish men running against each other (arguing about who's had more stents and who has more houses, like at the kiddush in a Conservative shul), that's not how America writ large perceives this race. Sanders and Bloomberg are barely registering in mainstream politics as Jewish. It's a remarkable, final gift from the goldeneh medinah - the golden land, as Yiddish-speaking immigrants once called the United States - at a time when American Jews have never needed it more.

Take, for example, the recentvandalism of Bloomberg's campaign offices with epithets including "racist," "sexist," "oligarch" and "corporate pig." Yes, Bloomberg is Jewish, and...