“Play is the work of the child,” educator Maria Montessori famously asserted. As Michael Kimmel makes clear in “Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America,” this wasn’t always so. For centuries, life for most children was mostly work – and little play. 

That was certainly the experience of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America between 1881 and 1924, fleeing pogroms and the miserable conditions inside the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. Taking up 500,000 square miles, the Pale included what are now parts of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova. 

Kimmel contends that the very nature of American childhood changed in the mid-20th century – thanks in large part to these Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Crammed into squalid urban tenements in “a land of both unimaginable riches and entirely familiar bigotries,” he writes, these new Americans imagined an “idealized childhood” that had eluded them. Barred from many professions, they created their own opportunities in newly developing areas, such as entertainment and toys.

Although Kimmel insists that his aim in writing “Playmakers” was not to present a “triumphalist parade of extraordinary Jews,” the procession of Jewish innovators who march through this book is indeed impressive.  

Much has been written about the men who established Hollywood’s studio system – Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers. But it is less widely known that Jewish immigrants and their offspring also dreamed up America’s most iconic comic book heroes – Superman, Spider-Man, Li’l Abner, Popeye, Archie – and produced thousands of popular toys, including teddy bears, Shirley Temple dolls, Barbie, and Mr. Potato Head. 

The companies that created these classic playthings were founded by the three Hassenfeld brothers (Hasbro); Elliot and Ruth Handler (Mattel); Joshua Lionel Cowen (Lionel trains); Morris Michtom (Ideal). They all came from Eastern Europe. 

“Playmakers” started as a family memoir about the Ideal Toy Corp., which was founded in 1907 by the author’s maternal great-great uncle. But Kimmel, a professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University, became fascinated by the bigger picture, and by questions about why and how these Jewish émigrés were “able to create such a large part [of] the material culture of American childhood.” 

He begins with his great-great uncle’s story, a familiar saga of immigration. Moshe Michael Charmatz was born in Minsk in 1869, and with his family’s help, staged his own death to avoid conscription into the czar’s army. He fled to Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he became a rabbinical student, met his future wife, and changed his name to Morris Michtom (“rhymes with victim”), perhaps after the Talmud’s six Psalms of David known as the Miktam. In 1888, he made his way to the Netherlands and on to America, where he and his wife, Rose, eventually opened a candy and newspaper shop in Brooklyn, New York. In 1902, Michtom was so charmed by a cartoon depicting President Theodore Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot an injured bear on a hunting expedition that he asked Rose to stitch together a stuffed replica of the winsome creature to display in their store window. The cuddly teddy bear changed their lives and helped launch the American toy business.

Kimmel, the author of numerous books on men and masculinity, including “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men,” also explores how playthings became increasingly gendered: babydolls for girls and action figures such as G.I. Joe for boys. From there it is several hops, skips, and jumps to grown-up dolls for girls (most notably, Ruth Handler’s Barbie for Mattel) and electric trains and airplane-building kits, which aimed at promoting father-son bonds. 

“Playmakers” is overstuffed with stories about winning ideas in an industry that demanded new hits every season. Reading about the development of Hula-Hoops, Chatty Cathy and Patti Playpal dolls, Easy-Bake Ovens, Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth, Lite-Brites, and Ant Farms – and the ads that plugged them on children’s TV shows – is nostalgia-inducing, particularly for baby boomers. But reading the backstory of toy after toy starts to feel overwhelming.  

Kimmel doesn’t just stick to toys and their creators. His purview extends to blacklisted writers who found refuge in children’s books, debates between the merits of disciplinary versus progressive child-rearing, and Senate hearings about whether comic books and TV discouraged reading and encouraged juvenile delinquency. 

A chapter on Superman is particularly engaging. The comic strip was created in the 1930s by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two friends who met in high school in Glenville, Ohio. Both were sons of shtetl immigrants. “Superman was Jewish,” Kimmel declares. The narrative, he explains, is essentially a classic refugee tale about a baby named Kal-El (“All that God is” in Hebrew) who was “conveyed by a form of Kindertransport” to an alien land because “his people were about to become extinct.” 

Clark Kent is a misfit outsider who yearns for acceptance and assimilation. Kimmel quotes Jules Feiffer for this knockout punch: “It wasn’t Krypton that Superman really came from, it was the planet Minsk.” 

Superman ushered in a golden age of comics, “created in large part because a slew of young Jewish artists had been frozen out of the higher sorts of artistic endeavors,” he writes. “By creating these hypermasculine superheroes, a whole bunch of scrawny, bullied, young Jewish artists asserted their masculinity. Comic books were indeed the revenge of the nerds – with yarmulkes!”  

Exuberantly researched and written, “Playmakers” is sprinkled with well-chosen illustrations. Although Kimmel’s overflowing, somewhat repetitive toybox of a book cries for some winnowing, it also sparks plenty of wonder – along with a fresh understanding of the serious business of play.