The untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who
literally manufactured “the century of the child.”
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.
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