Editor’s Note: Sheila Weller is a New York Times bestselling author, a senior contributing editor at Glamour and a contributor to Vanity Fair. Her newest book is Girls Like Us. She recently inked a deal with HarperCollins to write a biography of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Every so often a piece of media-touted but exceedingly silly news sends a thrill through one’s soul. It’s what’s unsaid — but clearly indicated — about that piece of news that makes one’s heart go pitter-pat. The secretly elating trivia bobs up and down in one’s consciousness all day, like a half-remembered happy dream while one checks one’s e-mail and boards the subway and conspires with one’s literary agent and gets impatient with overly solicitous telemarketers named Bob from Bangalore. Yet it’s so politically incorrect, and so revealing of extremely tacky count-keeping, that one cannot utter this small gem of joy out loud — it’s embarrassing. But blogs are exactly the place for this kind of verboten sentiment, right? And so: Yesterday was this kind of day for me. And, like James Brown, I’m saying it loud and proud: We now have our first Jewish Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover girl!

Well, let me nervously say: I assume that Israeli citizen Bar Refaeli (who is Leo DiCaprio’s main squeeze) is Jewish. (Translation: I hope she is.) I’d read somewhere that she was drafted for — but evaded service in — the IDF. Therefore, I would assume (you, too?) that she’s a member of that race and gender of women (of which I’m one) who have a long history of thinking ourselves capable and even superior in countless ways, but never thought our noses were small enough or legs were long enough or our general physical set was coolly, lankily, self-assuredly sexy enough to qualify for a form of merit that we may have made fun of and looked down on and even actively protested against, but which never — in our heart of hearts — didn’t matter. (Golda Meir once begged an interviewer: "Please? Just make sure I look good in the picture.")

I remember reading once, with a knowing smile, that a group of  Israeli journalists had descended on the Mets, Blue Jays or Yankees front office and coolly inquired, "What of this fellow, Cohen?" To their great disappointment, it was Cone, not Cohen, to which the first name David was affixed. (Alas, Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax didn’t have a triptych-maker.) In that same way, I, a secret lifelong beauty-contest devotee, had once — decades ago — inwardly exclaimed, when the Miss America crown landed on its latest head: "Tawny Golden!" — the long-awaited follow-up to Bess Myerson! — only to have my shameful elation dashed by the fact that her name was Tawny Godin, and she was German (and soon married a star of a show like "Hee Haw"). We want what we secretly least expect of ourselves, or what we think the gods, or genes, have cruelly conspired to deny us: As Jewish boys long to find Jewish super-jocks, it’s a secret hope for Jewish girls to find arrogant, long-legged (that leg part is very important) Jewish drop-dead beauties. And so, having just inaugurated an African American president, what lovely symmetry that we have this asterisk — this grace note, this sidekick — of a milestone.

Maybe I’m especially sensitive to all of this. I grew up in a time and place — glamorous ’50s Hollywood — where the air was thick with the unspoken obvious: The Jews were smart and the other people were gorgeous. It was that unyielding Maginot Line that led so many otherwise blithe, conceited women to the vague, panicked, escalating anxiety that made them reach for excessive doses of Miltown and sometimes end up in sanitariums or outpatient shock-treatment clinics.