← New Books Network
New Books Network
Michael Kimmel, "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)
00:33:15
Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:01]
Renee Garfinkel
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
Nordstrom Rack Announcer
New markdowns up to 70% off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. And that means so many new reasons
- [00:10]
Renee Garfinkel
to rack cause I always find something amazing.
- [00:12]
Michael Kimmel
Just so many good brands cause there's always something new.
- [00:16]
Nordstrom Rack Announcer
Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you wreck
- [00:30]
Hilton Announcer
when you want your spring break to feel like
- [00:35]
Michael Kimmel
and
- [00:35]
Hilton Announcer
your kids pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like.
- [00:43]
Renee Garfinkel
Ooh.
- [00:44]
Hilton Announcer
And room service to feel like. Because at Hilton hospitality feels like your cabana's ready.
- [00:50]
Michael Kimmel
Would you like fresh towels?
- [00:51]
Hilton Announcer
It matters where you stay. Book now@hilton.com Hilton this day this episode is brought to you by Nespresso introducing Vertuo up, the latest in a long line of innovation from Nespresso. It's innovation you can touch, sense and taste in every single cup. With a three second start, easy open lever and dedicated brew over ice button, it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way. Sip for yourself. Shop Virtuo up exclusively@nespreso.com
- [01:29]
Michael Kimmel
welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Renee Garfinkel
Hello and welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm your host, Renee Garfinkel. Today we're joined by Michael Kimmel, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He's one of the world's most widely read and respected sociologists of gender. Kimmel is the author of more than 20 books, including Manhood in America. In his new book, the Jewish Entrepreneurs who Created the Toy Industry in America, Kimmel turns his sociological eye to something at once unexpected and utterly intimate. The toys, stories and childhood landscapes that shaped the American 20th century. Beginning with the invention of the Teddy bear, Kimmel traces how first generation Jewish immigrants, many raised in grinding poverty and outsiders in American society, ended up creating the dolls, comics, publishing houses, and even parenting advice industries that effectively invented American childhood. This is a deeply researched history, but also a personal one. It is at the same time a story of immigration, marginality and imagination and how people who never had a carefree childhood themselves built one for the rest of the country. Michael Kimmel, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:01]
Michael Kimmel
Thank you so much, Renee. Pleasure to be here, Michael.
- [03:04]
Renee Garfinkel
You begin the book with a photograph of Shirley Temple sitting on your great great uncle's lap. When did you first realize that this family story was bigger than a family story?
- [03:16]
Michael Kimmel
Well, when I retired in 2020, just in time for Covid. I was sort of thinking about, like, what I might do in my next project if I was going to write something. And this photograph that you describe, that's the front piece for the book, actually sat on my family piano for decades. And I kind of knew. I knew who Shirley Temple was and I kind of had heard of the man on whose lap she was sitting, Maurice Michtom. And so I decided that he was one of those Yiddish speaking Jews who came from. He himself came from a shtetl outside of Minsk. And I decided I was going to tell the family story and the story of how he came here with what he found, what he did, and how he and his wife Rose actually became the founders of the Ideal Toy Company, which by the time I was a child in the 1950s, was the largest toy company in the world. So I decided I would write this little family history. I didn't expect it to be more than 100 pages long. And so that's how I started thinking about it was just like, let me talk about him, let me tell his story.
- [04:38]
Renee Garfinkel
And then what happened?
- [04:40]
Michael Kimmel
Well, so I'll tell you his story first. So he owned a candy store in Bedford Stuyvesant. And one day in 1902, he was reading. He read voraciously through all the newspapers and magazines that came through the candy store. And one day he was reading an article about Theodore Roosevelt, who had been on a bear hunt in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and how he had been on this bear hunt for a week. He hadn't seen a bear. He was really grumpy. And then they sort of found this old bedraggled bear and they tied it to a tree and said, come on, you can shoot this bear. He took one look at it, said, no, thanks. And a cartoonist for the Washington Post happened to be along on the trip and drew a cartoon of this. Morris saw this cartoon and thought, isn't that charming? And he's later said to have said, the czar was never so generous. And so he and his wife Rose went down to the basement. They put together a little model of this bear that he refused to shoot. They put it in the window of the candy store. People came by and said, oh, that's really cool. What's that? And they called it Teddy's Bear. And people said they wanted one. They wanted one for themselves. They loved the story. So Morris and Rose started making these. Little Teddy's bear in their basement. Had a couple of young boys from the neighborhood. What Jewish boy in Brooklyn in 1902 didn't know a little tailoring? And so they, so they started making them. They asked Theodore Roosevelt for permission to use his name. He said, sure. And that was the origin story of the teddy bear. So they went into production. They started the Ideal Toy Company. And so that was the story that I was going to tell. And there comes a time, I think, with every writer when they're having a great time writing along and they suddenly get to a, a bump or a stop or an obstacle of some kind. And the obstacle for me was I didn't know anything about the toy industry. I didn't know anything about the history of the industry. I didn't know anything about the, you know, the, the factories that made them, the designers that created them, the sales teams that sold them, the department stores that, that, that offered them to the public. So I had no idea. And so that's when I said I could either stop this little memoir at page 100 or, or I can ask the question, what else was going on in the toy industry? And that's what led me into the book that I eventually wrote. Because it turned out that virtually all of the, that first group of toy makers, of toy creators, of toy companies, were founded by first generation Jews. Now, when I use the word first generation, what I mean is first generation born in America, Morris had been born, as I said, in Eastern Europe, but virtually all of them were actually born into terrible poverty, as you mentioned, on the Lower east side in Brooklyn. And they created the modern toy industry. I'm talking about the Hassenfeld brothers who created Hasbro, the handlers who created Mattel, Lionel trains, Aaron B. Dolls, SNB dolls, Madame Alexander dolls, Louis Marx Pressman. All but a handful of all of the great toy makers in the first half of the 20th century were first generation Jews. And I said, well, that's a story I never read. And I don't know if other authors have told you this, Renee, but I think very often one writes the book they wanted to have read. Why didn't I ever read this story? Why didn't I know this story? So I decided I would investigate. And that's what led me into this enormous field of basically the creation of the material culture of childhood in America in the 20th century.
- [08:56]
Renee Garfinkel
Well, how did it feel for you, a scholar of masculinity? Your books explore violence and social change. How did it feel for you to suddenly be researching toys and nostalgia and childhood?
- [09:12]
Michael Kimmel
It was so great because I didn't know anything about it. You know, when I've written my other books, Manhood in America or Angry White Men, or I interviewed Neo Nazis and white supremacists for a book for healing from Hate. You know, all of these books, I kind of knew what I was going to find when I did the interviews, when I did the archival work, I went looking for it, and I found basically what I was expecting to find with minor surprises. But here was a field I knew nothing about. So you can imagine the excitement when I would bump up against something that I said, oh, my God, you know, I had no idea that this was. That they were Jewish or, you know, for example, my wife and son always joke about this. Cause I would be working downstairs in my study, and I would come upstairs to make dinner, and I would come upstairs every day with a new discovery. Like, you won't believe it, but Popeye was Jewish. And it turns out not only Elze Seagar, who was the cartoonist who drew Popeye, but the model for Popeye himself was in fact a Polish Jewish immigrant who was a bouncer at a bar in Cincinnati named Rocky Fiegel. And when Popeye became so famous and Seagar made a lot of money based on his comic strip and then cartoons of Popeye, he actually supported figal in his old age with the royalties. So those kinds of discoveries, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no idea the richness of this history. So it was really quite fun and exciting. I was sort of making up a field as I went along.
- [10:56]
Renee Garfinkel
Did writing it ever make you think to reevaluate your own childhood in a new light?
- [11:04]
Michael Kimmel
Well, sure. Let me put it this way. One of the things, once I started mapping this field and I started looking at comic strips and comic books and child development literature, I also looked at a lot of children's books. And it turns out the New York Public Library a few years ago did a list of the hundred most important children's books of the 20th century. And of those 100 most important children's books, about 40 were written by first generation Jews. I thought, well, that's pretty interesting. So here's how it helped me reevaluate my childhood. The books that I read, the books that were read to me, Curious George, caps for sale, all in one family. Harold and the Purple Crayon, and of course, Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, and anything by Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are, they were all written by first generation Jews. These stories had a backstory, and the backstory was actually the story of people that I was related to. My great, great uncle Morris Michtum invented the teddy bear. My, you know, sort of My great uncle, who was invented the pogo stick. And so all of these things that animated my own childhood had a backstory that connected me to the history of these first generation Jews. So I found that really moving as I was researching and writing this.
- [12:47]
Renee Garfinkel
I can understand that you, you use the phrase that these first generation Jewish immigrants essentially invented American childhood. What did you mean by that?
- [13:02]
Michael Kimmel
Well, it became kind of an equation for me. It's a very contentious claim, right? I mean, I mean it to be kind of an argument like, oh, really? Prove it. So what I did was I tried to map first the original toy makers, doll makers. And then I branched out and I said, well, where did they get their ideas for dolls? Where did they get their ideas for toys? One place that they looked was comic strips like Joe Palooka drawn by Ham Fisher, first generation Jew, or Li Abner drawn by Al Capp, a first generation Jew. And all of these others, Rube Goldberg, the creator of all these fantastically complex ways of doing menial household tasks. You know, Milt Gross, all of these cartoonists drew comic strips that they were then licensed to make into toys and dolls. And then of course, the world of comic books, familiar to many of us through the work of Michael Chabon Cavalier and Clay. But also, but many, many comic book historians have pointed out how all of the most famous comic books, comic strip heroes were in fact drawn by first generation Jews. Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman, Stan Lee and the Marvel Universe. Jack Kirby, who created the thing. I mean, every one of them was created by first generation Jews. And his story, a story that. Here's an additional piece to the entire project which was they didn't want to make comic books. They were artists. They wanted to go into advertising, which in the 1930s was a very white shoe, very Protestant and very anti Semitic profession. So they would go to these ad agencies with their portfolios. The ad agencies would say, thanks very much, it's very good work. Are you Jewish? And they would say, yes. And they said, well, we already have our quota of Jews. So they couldn't get jobs in advertising, so they went to the pulps, which was the comic book world. And then they created this whole fantastic universe. So now I'm making an additive argument. I got the comic books, the comic strips, the children's books, which I was just talking about, the parents magazines advice columns, you know, dear Abbey and Ann Landers were both first generation Jews, twin sisters, and all of the parenting advice books founded by George Hecht, who ran Parents Magazine, the child study center, and eventually owned FAO Schwartz. And then the last piece in this was the entire field of developmental psychology of child psychology was transformed in the post war era by first generation Jewish psychologists. Everyone from Erik Eritson, Yuri Brofenbrenner, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Chaim Gannot, and probably the king of developmental psychology, Abraham Maslow. All of them first generation Jews. So what I came to conclude by the end of the book was that first generation Jews created the material culture of the childhood that we knew in the 20th century. The childhood that I grew up with in the 1950s and 1960s. They created the dolls, the toys, the games, the puzzles, the model airplanes that I used to put together with glue and the decals on them. Everything were created by first generation Jews. So I decided to make the bigger argument that first generation Jews have basically created childhood as we know it.
- [16:56]
Priceline Announcer
We all have that dream trip we've been wishing we could go on. But too often life or usually price gets in the way. That's why Priceline is here to help you turn your dream trip into reality. With up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights, you can book everything you need for your next adventure. Don't just dream about that next trip, book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit priceline.com and book your next trip today.
- [17:23]
Renee Garfinkel
Go to your happy price.
- [17:25]
Michael Kimmel
Priceline. Just the tips. Just the tips stops those split ends lickety split. Look at those ends they are amending.
- [17:35]
Hilton Announcer
Now that's what I call a happy ending.
- [17:37]
Michael Kimmel
RedKent ABC hair bandage bomb
- [17:42]
Microsoft 365 Copilot Announcer
the world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 Copilot now you mentioned
- [18:13]
Renee Garfinkel
the marginality that that generation of Jews had to suffer or experience. They were never fully accepted by the American elite. How did that marginality help shape their vision of childhood?
- [18:30]
Michael Kimmel
Well, I think in some ways my conclusion was these creative, entrepreneurial first generation Jews created the childhoods that they themselves wished they had had. They didn't have it, but they imagined it. The great Frankfurt School theorist Theodore Adorno once said that imagination is the only true homeland of the Jews. And it seems to me that in our wanderings over millennia, Jews were always the visiting team, never the home team. And as if they always experience this marginality, they experience the double consciousness that W.E.B. du Bois talks about about black people, which is Jews are both insiders and outsiders. To the anti Semites, Jews are the ultimate insiders. They've managed to maneuver their way into every crevice of every and every position of power. On the other hand, to the waspili, Jews remain the outsider. So they're both insider and outsider. They see themselves as themselves, and they also see themselves as others see them. That's what Du Bois talked about, about that double consciousness. I think that marginality is an important piece of why it was these Jews at that time in. In this place. They didn't do it in Britain, they didn't do it in France, they didn't do it in Germany. They did it in the US in that massive wave, the second wave of Jewish immigration at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. Now, when they arrived here poor and penniless, Morris said that he had 20 cents in his pocket. When he arrived at Castle Garden, which preceded Ellis island, he, you know, they all. They encountered those 2.5 million Jews who came between 1885 and 1920, encountered a group of Jews who had already come from Germany in the mid 19th century. They were quite prosperous, middle class, and they owned all the department stores. A crucial piece of the story because all those department stores, whether it was Bloomingdale's or Macy's or or Gimbels or EJ Corvettes or Imagin, every one of these stores was founded by German Jews. Where do you think they sold the toys? So the infrastructure for this Jewish creation of that material culture was already present. Some German Jews, of course, were very upset with all these shtetl Jews who spoke only Yiddish and made them look bad because of the, you know, the. The dirty slums of tenements of the Lower east side. But other German Jews recognized that, you know, they're our brethren and they wanted to help and that the entire fields of the Jewish charities basically created the field of social work in America.
- [21:36]
Renee Garfinkel
Right. Was there a toy industry before that generation, or did they invent the whole industry?
- [21:44]
Michael Kimmel
Good question. They invented the industry. Prior to 1900, the toys, most toys in America were handmade. They were little toy boats made out of wood. They were rag dolls for girls. The only really professionally made toys, manufactured toys were imported from Germany, which was the center of the toy industry in the 19th century. Metal toys, wooden toys, all those, you know, those images of those little aristocratic children in Europe playing with those Tin soldiers. Those tin soldiers were all manufactured in Germany. In fact, dolls at the turn of the century, dolls were created with porcelain or bisque heads and they were quite fragile and you didn't play with them. They were put on shelves in the brake front on top shelves, so you couldn't get to them. It was the, you know, it was really the American toy manufacturers who used new materials like rubber and later plastic after the second World War to create all of the toys. An interesting anecdote. Madame Alexander, who created some of the most famous dolls of the, of the 20th century. Madame Alexander's father was a doll doctor because sometimes those dolls heads would break and his old profession was to repair them. So she became involved in the doll industry because she wanted to help people figure out how to make a doll that was unbreakable.
- [23:20]
Renee Garfinkel
Fascinating. And let's talk about the psychology of these entrepreneurs for a minute. And most of them came from tough environments, scarcity, violence in the slums. Why do you think they were able to channel that experience into the kind of gentleness and imagination of the toys that you've talked about instead of harder edged toys?
- [23:49]
Michael Kimmel
I think this is the crucial question that I began to think about in doing this. They happened to come at, at the turn of the 20th century and the dominant and the big progressive movement, progressivism of the time was based on demographic, economic, social changes that were taking place in the United States and elsewhere. The compulsory schooling, for example, the campaigns to end child labor, the invention of adolescents, 1904 G. Stanley hall creates this whole new stage of development between childhood and adulthood. So progressivism was the sort of defining ideology. And these Yiddish speaking shtetl Jews come in droves and tied up in their cardboard suitcases that were held together by string was an idea of childhood that fit perfectly with the progressive ideas of the time of John Dewey and others in the 19th century. Child rearing books in the United States basically had one theme. And that theme was children are willful. And the goal of child rearing is to break their will. You should never show physical affection to your children. One of the great theorists of child development, John Watson, who sold millions of copies of books prior to Dr. Spock. John Watson said, you shouldn't ever really hug or kiss your child. You should shake their hand in the morning, pat them on the head, but no physical sex, and never let them sit in your lap. Others, you know, if your child starts crying in the night, administer a sound spanking that'll stop them. And they still, Jews come, come over with a completely different Idea of children. Children are creative. Children are, as the Talmud says, a garland of roses. They're Yiddish, they're special, they're creative, they're curious, they're to be nurtured, not bro. And so remember that the idea of the dominant, nurturing Jewish mother was originally a positive stereotype because. And so they came with an idea of childhood that was different, and it fit in and articulated perfectly at that moment with the new ideology of child rearing in the 20th century. So I think this is a really important piece of it, which is, was that Jews had a different idea of childhood, and then they went about furnishing it.
- [26:24]
Renee Garfinkel
What do you think would most surprise the toy makers you write about if they saw the 21st century childhood?
- [26:35]
Michael Kimmel
I think they would be ambivalent, frankly. I think sometimes they would be thrilled to see the kinds of inventions and creativity. And then also some of these guys were. They were so poor and they had so little, and they created things on sidewalks with discarded pieces of chalk. And one guy used a train schedule to create an entire universe of manufacturing and industry. Bernie Loomis, who created dozens of toys, many of which are well known. Bernie Loomis used to create entire baseball seasons based on the newspaper clippings that he could find. I think they would feel like these kids have it way too easy, and their creativity is sometimes stymied by the very things that they play with, as opposed to the kind of allowing them the more freedom to roam and to create and to be bored and in that boredom, to figure something out. So I think they'd be ambivalent, they'd be thrilled, and they'd be wary.
- [27:56]
Renee Garfinkel
So when you say the toys that discourage or don't give an opportunity for creativity, are you talking about the kind of digital or branded or algorithmic toys that are really kind of different than dolls and teddy bears and action figures?
- [28:17]
Michael Kimmel
Well, I think there's a place for all of it. I think there's a place, you know, the dolls allow for a massive amount of creativity to create entire scenes, entire backstories or stories with their dolls. I think action figures do the same. You get to recreate things you've seen, and then you get to play with them. I think of it in terms of analogy to fan fiction, where people take stories that have been written by others, and then they write and, you know, they write sequels to them. They write entire. You know, So I think the notion. Anything that fosters that kind of creativity, that doesn't do it for you, but actually fosters that kind of creativity I think they would embrace it and I think parents ought to as well. The, the, the kind of completed version that you often give to, that we can often give to children that can suppress creativity or substitute for it. I think that's the, that's something problematic. And of course, the, you know, something that feeds you all of the information that you'll ever need, you know, could be both good and bad. I'm not a, I'm, you know, I'm not one of these people who thinks that the Internet is like, you know, universally bad, nor universally good.
- [29:40]
Renee Garfinkel
I understand seven of the top ten global toy companies today descend from these early Jewish immigrant ventures. What do you think is the most enduring piece of their DNA?
- [29:53]
Michael Kimmel
You know, well, the number one, number one is neither. When you say seven of ten, those are almost, are Hasbro Mattel or subsidiaries of Hasbro and Mattel Hot Wheels, for example. But the number one toy company in the world is Lego, right?
- [30:11]
Renee Garfinkel
Of course.
- [30:12]
Michael Kimmel
And boy, does that, you know, on the one hand gives you these big models of things to emulate and to copy, but it also allows for a massive amount of creativity. And so I think that what binds these toys together is both the opportunity to create and also the opportunity to have fun as a child. And that I think is, you know, there's the old story. You know, when I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I grew up, I put away childish things. The beauty of these Jewish immigrants is they never put them away. They allowed the creativity to, to come forward and create for children what they themselves never had.
- [31:06]
Renee Garfinkel
Finally, Michael, after spending so much time in the world of toy makers, if you had to place one object on the symbolic altar of American childhood, what would it be and why?
- [31:19]
Michael Kimmel
Well, you know, of all of the toys I still, probably the most iconic toy of the 20th century was still the teddy bear. And one of the things that I like so much about the teddy bear is that it's genderless. I spend some time in the book speculating about why a bear. Why a bear cub? Why not? You know, most children who play with teddy bears have never seen a bear. How about a little dog or a little cat or why not a giraffe? You know, and I think the teddy bear, and particularly because the bear is not a full on bear, it's a cub, it's a child, it's a, it's a baby. And it's the wild, the wildness of, of the, of nature. But tamed and cuddly and teddy bears spawned hundreds and hundreds of stuffed animals that people played with and hugged at night and gave comfort. You know that Anna Freud, Freud's daughter, actually theorized that children should have teddy bears because it tames the angry, authoritarian father the bear tamed. So I think the teddy bear remains the iconic toy because anybody can love it and it loves everyone back.
- [32:41]
Renee Garfinkel
The book is the Jewish Entrepreneurs who Created the Toy Industry in America by Michael Kimmel. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Michael. I really enjoyed the book.
- [32:54]
Michael Kimmel
I'm so glad you did. And it was a pleasure to talk to you, Renee. Thank you.
- [32:58]
Renee Garfinkel
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasakov.
- [33:13]
Ross Announcer
Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho, look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling, Ross. Work your magic.