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Two Jews Make the Top 20 of Forbes’ Annual ‘Most Powerful People’ List

Ben Bernanke, the outgoing Federal Reserve chairman, was No. 7 on the Forbes annual World’s Most Powerful People list topped by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The only other Jewish person to make the Top 20 on the list released Wednesday was Google co-founder Sergey Brin at No. 17.

Putin displaced President Obama at No. 1; the U.S. leader dropped to second among the 72 people named. Rounding out the top 5 were Xi Jinping, general secretary of China’s Communist Party, Pope Francis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Other Jews on the list included Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at 24; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 26; Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, at 27; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 29.

Also, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies, at 47; Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, at 58; Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, at 68; and Janet Yellen, the incoming head of the Federal Reserve, identified on the list as the central bank’s vice chairman, at 72.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini-Khamenei was ranked No. 23.

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