Counting Jews in the Vanity Fair 100, the magazine's annual list of the world's most powerful people, is not something any sane publication in New York would be caught dead doing. The Jerusalem Post, however, went to the trouble of separating the chosen from the chaff in their Thursday edition. More than half of the world's most powerful people are Jewish, according to VF (and the Post), although the methodology is laughably murky in both instances: The listers don't define “power,” and the parsers don't define “Jewish.” Take, for instance, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who share No. 3: Do they count as, uh, one or two Jews? Page's mother is Jewish, which is good enough for the Jerusalem Post even if it's not for Page himself, who says he's been raised “in the mold of his father.” (The next indisputably Hebraic contender, Michael Bloomberg, clocks in at No. 9.) The Israeli paper seems more spooked than impressed by the results: If anything, it gingerly notes, Vanity Fair reinforces some of the world's worst stereotypes by calling attention to “their disproportionate influence in finance and the media.” Of course, should they find such ostentatious triumph unbecoming, the writers are welcome to thumb through the Sports Illustrated Top 500 NFL Players list next.

Jewish Power Dominates at 'Vanity Fair' [Jerusalem Post]