Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America - Hardcover

by Michael Kimmel (Author)

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear--bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression--in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfeld brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains.

From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely Jewish--the company founders, executives, and designers, as well as the factory workers, wholesale distributors, retail outlets, and armies of salesmen. A descendant of the founders of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel shows how these poor, often Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling children of immigrants invented a world they never experienced for themselves. Along with the toys and Jewish toymakers that climbed the ladder of success, Kimmel also portrays the rise of an entire culture focused on children, led by Jewish comic book creators, children's authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists.

The first full-scale toy history of the United States, Kimmel's story conjures the colorful, imaginative, restless spirits who followed the promise of the American Dream--and describes the ways in which the world they came from molded their beloved creations. Playmakers shows that the overlapping experiences of being a Jew, an immigrant, and a child in twentieth-century America--an outsider looking in, a person desperate to be accepted--created childhood as we know it today.

Back Jacket

Praise for the Work of Michael Kimmel

Healing from Hate

"Important and moving. . . . In Healing from Hate, an illuminating book building on over twenty years of thinking and research, Michael Kimmel shows that the boy crisis provides fertile ground for recruiters from white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and other extremist groups."
-- Arlie Russell Hochschild, New York Review of Books

Angry White Men

"Fascinating. . . . No dry academic study, Angry White Men is full of shrewd political analysis, empathy, and humor."
-- Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation

Guyland

"Michael Kimmel's Guyland could save the humanity of many young men--and the sanity of their friends and parents--by explaining the forces behind a newly extended adolescence. With accuracy and empathy, he names the problem and offers compassionate bridges to adulthood."
-- Gloria Steinem