Playmakers

The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America

By: Michael Kimmel

Narrated by: Adam Grupper

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear 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.

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. 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. 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 created childhood as we know it today.

©2026 Michael Kimmel (P)2026 Tantor Media