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

Mar 14, 2026

Michael Kimmel, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus and author of Playmakers, explores how first-generation Jewish entrepreneurs built America’s toy industry. He traces the origin of the teddy bear, the rise of companies like Hasbro and Mattel, and how immigrant imagination shaped an idealized American childhood. The conversation highlights toymaking, cultural roots, and the lasting influence of those early creators.

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ANECDOTE

How The Teddy Bear Was Invented

Morris and Rose Michtom invented the teddy bear in 1902 after Morris saw a cartoon about Theodore Roosevelt sparing a bear.
They made stuffed bears in their Brooklyn candy store basement, asked Roosevelt to use his name, and started Ideal Toy Company.

INSIGHT

First Generation Jews Built The Toy Industry

Nearly all major early 20th-century American toy companies were founded by first-generation Jews from immigrant, often poor backgrounds.
Kimmel maps founders like the Hasenfelds (Hasbro), the Handlers (Mattel), Lionel, Madame Alexander, Louis Marx and others to show a Jewish-dominated industry.

INSIGHT

Toys Grew Out Of Jewish Storytelling

Jewish creators supplied not just toys but the stories and characters that became toys: comic strips, comic books, and children's books.
Creators like Siegel & Schuster (Superman), Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Rube Goldberg produced intellectual property licensed into toys.

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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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