New Books in Economic and Business History

Michael Kimmel, "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

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Mar 14, 2026

Michael Kimmel, Sociologist and author of Playmakers, traces how first-generation Jewish entrepreneurs built America’s toy industry. He recounts the teddy bear’s origins, uncovers a hidden Jewish toymaking network, and links immigrant marginality to imaginative childhood culture. He also explores comic creators, child-rearing ideas, and the lasting influence of those firms on modern play.

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ANECDOTE

Origin Story Of The Teddy Bear

Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in their Brooklyn candy store in 1902 after Morris saw a cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear.
They made bears in their basement, asked Roosevelt to use his name, he agreed, and they launched the Ideal Toy Company which grew into a major toy maker.

INSIGHT

Jewish Founders Built The Toy Industry

Nearly all major early 20th century American toy companies were founded by first-generation Jewish entrepreneurs from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
Companies included Ideal, Hasbro, Mattel, Lionel, Madame Alexander, Louis Marx, Pressman and many more.

INSIGHT

Jewish Creatives Invented American Childhood Culture

First-generation Jewish creators shaped not only toys but comic strips, comic books, children's books, parenting media and developmental psychology that defined 20th-century American childhood.
Creators included Siegel and Shuster, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats and psychologists like Erik Erikson and Abraham Maslow.

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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: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026) 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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