Beyond Synagogues and Cemeteries: The Built Environment as an Aspect of Vernacular Jewish Material Culture in Charleston, South Carolina BARRY L. STIEFEL To date, synagogues and cemeteries have received the bulk of atten- tion in the analysis and preservation of large, immovable Jewish material culture in the United States, skewing our understanding of buildings and neighborhoods as a type of cultural artifact. This is in contrast to smaller, movable material items, such as ritual objects and personal ef- fects. However, despite the time even the most pious Jews may have spent in a synagogue—or at their eternal rest within a cemetery—American Jews do not live in these places. They live in houses and work elsewhere, spending most of their lives outside of synagogues and cemeteries. From a material culture perspective, little attention has been paid to the places where American Jews do live and work, and what they do (or do not do) to make those places Jewish. For example, there are between eight and fifteen thousand historic house museums in the United States. Of these, only six are known to have a Jewish theme, and to have been the place where the primary person or family of interest who resided there lived a Jewish lifestyle of some form. 1 Perhaps the most famous of these are some of the apartments in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. This study will focus on such residences, places of employment, and other institutional facilities in order to counterbalance our understanding, so that we have a more holistic appreciation of Jew- ish material culture in America. No place provides a better opportunity to extend this more holistic appreciation than Charleston, South Carolina. This city makes for an intriguing case study because it is often seen as the birthplace of the Reform movement in North America, though it also continues to have 1. These six Jewish house museums are the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City; the Gomez Mill House in Marlboro, New York; the Block-Catts House near Washington, Arkansas; the Golda Meir House Museum in Denver, Colorado; the Moses Myers House of Norfolk, Virginia, and the Haas-Lilienthal House of San Francisco, California. See Barry Stiefel, “The Other House Museum: Places of Worship and the Case of Synagogues,” in Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, vol. 10 (2014): 83–103. Volume 101, Issue 2 of American Jewish History