///... Weekend WASHINGTON FREE BEACON .......-------------------------....... One tool important to childhood development: Toys! And you might be surprised what the makers of our most iconic brands have in common (okay, maybe you won't be surprised): Stuart Halpern reviews Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America by Michael Kimmel. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!p69u!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd7b2605-ddfa-46c0-8ec7-738f0a99731f_695x491.jpeg “The Jewish entrepreneurs who sparked such transformative changes did so in ‘a land of both unimaginable riches and entirely familiar bigotries. Yet in spite of—and because of-these struggles, they shared a clear vision for what childhood might look like, a vision borne out in the toys they made, the stores they ran, the comics they drew, and the books they wrote.’ “The contributions of the staples of American childhood taken for granted today were overwhelmingly the result of these immigrants’ or their children’s gumption. The list is seemingly never-ending: The Hassenfeld brothers—Henry, Hillel, and Herman—founded Hasbro (as in, ‘Hassenfeld Brothers’). Don Levine invented G.I. Joe. Ruth Moskowicz and her husband, Elliot Handler, created Mattel. Their children were Barbara and Kenneth, Barbie and Ken. Jack Pressman’s father, Abe, had fled pogroms and settled in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side. Jack founded Pressman Toys, with its immensely popular game of Chinese checkers. “As countless kids imagined the action around their toys, other Jewish creators were providing adventures in page form. Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) invented Batman; Harry Lampert, the Flash; Mortimer Weisinger, Green Arrow and Aquaman; Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), Captain America; and Stanley Martin Lieber (Stan Lee), Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and countless others. John Goldwater, creator of the quintessentially middle-American character Archie, was born Max Leonard Goldwasser in 1916. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, so the story goes, sketched out the first drawing of Superman on Mama Shuster’s challah board, which she used to prepare traditional bread for the Sabbath. An April 1940 article in the Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) criticized Superman’s creator as ‘an intellectually and physically circumcised chap … the inventor of a colorful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swim suit.’ Margarete Waldstein and her husband, Hans Augusto Reyersbach, escaped Hitler and created Curious George.” The dreidel, by contrast, was invented by a Methodist. Just kidding.