Leadership Quote by William L. Jenkins

The power here is in the quiet insistence that presence equals belonging. By anchoring the story “since the turn of the 20th century,” Jenkins isn’t merely dating a tradition; he’s making tenure do the argumentative work. A century of gathering becomes a rebuttal to the familiar suspicion that Jewish life in Appalachia is recent, imported, or somehow out of place. The sentence turns continuity into legitimacy.

Jenkins’ phrasing also performs a particular kind of regional politics: it normalizes minority faith not by grand moralizing, but by folding it into the everyday grammar of community life. “Meeting together to celebrate and worship” sounds deliberately plain, almost domestic. That plainness matters. It frames Jewish religious practice as neighborly routine rather than exotic difference, defusing the cultural othering that rural and small-town minorities have long faced.

The geography is doing subtextual heavy lifting, too. “Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia” signals a cross-border, patchwork region where communities often survive by pooling resources. Implicitly, it acknowledges the small numbers and the resilience required to sustain institutions outside major urban centers. There’s a soft civic lesson embedded here: identity in America is frequently maintained through networks, not proximity.

As a politician’s line, it reads like an inclusion statement built for a local audience: respectful, historically grounded, and low-drama. The intent is cohesion, but the context is clear: you don’t emphasize 1900s roots unless someone, somewhere, still needs convincing that these neighbors count.