Playmakers
The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Feb 17, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What do Superman, the teddy bear, and chattering wind-up teeth have in common? All were invented by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants, writes sociologist Kimmel (Guyland), great-grandnephew of the founder of the Ideal Toy Corporation, in this eye-opening history. Modern American childhood was created by those who never experienced a carefree childhood themselves, Kimmel notes; Jews arriving from Eastern Europe to late-19th-century New York City encountered crushing poverty that meant children grew up "largely on the street." Toymaking, meanwhile, was "small, relatively genteel, and almost entirely Protestant," with toys made mostly in Europe, until WWI embargoes helped the American toy industry boom. Plus, as the U.S. moved away from stern Puritanical ideals about "idle hands" and toward a sense of childhood as a separate stage of development filled with play, Yiddish notions of children as blessings fit nicely into the new progressive mold. Among the creators profiled are the Hassenfield brothers, rag sellers who eventually founded Hasbro; children's book authors like Maurice Sendak; and Jewish woodcarvers who fashioned elaborate carousels. The book pops with gleeful toy history (like Ideal Toy Company's "Baby Jesus doll," which the pope inexplicably endorsed but no one bought), though Kimmel sometimes overreaches (it seems unlikely that Spider-Man is even "indirectly inspired" by a spider that saved King David). It's an entertaining exploration of the sweeping influence of immigrant artists on American life.
