Playmakers

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in the back room of their Brooklyn sweet shop. Together, they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation into a pre-war 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 idealised 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 created childhood as we know it today.