Playmakers

A unique, illuminating 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 in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together, they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation into a prewar market rife with other first–generation American Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfield brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains. In Playmakers, Michael Kimmel documents the creation of the idealized American childhood in the twentieth century—an idea developed but not experienced by its creators, whose parents often were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe. From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Kimmel follows Jewish toymakers as they climbed the ladder of success alongside Jewish comic book creators, children’s authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists. Playmakers shows how the overlapping experiences of being a Jew and a child in twentieth–century America—an outsider looking in, a person desperate to be accepted—created childhood as we know it today.