Toys R Us?

In 2016, I visited the New Museum, downtown Manhattan’s citadel of contemporary art, to see an installation by Ydessa Hendeles called “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project).” Three thousand framed black-and-white photographs of teddy bears and their owners in various settings lined the walls, keeping company with actual samples of the soft fabric critters stuffed into vitrines.

This was not a snuggly, feel-good look at the innocent pleasures of childhood (though they could be found if you looked hard enough). Hendeles, a German-born conceptual artist, challenged us to think hard about the meaning of multiples and mass production in the twentieth century.

The teddy bear—the invention of Morris Michtom, an immigrant Jew who owned a candy store in Brooklyn with his wife, Rose—also figures prominently in Michael Kimmel’s Playmakers. The book isa spirited inquiry into the role Jews like Michtom—the author’s great-great uncle—played in the creation of the American toy industry. Kimmel, like Hendeles, also places great stock in numbers, but his kind of enumeration is more akin to counting heads for a minyan than steely postmodern theorizing.

Rustling up example after example of Jewish toymakers, Kimmel, a sociologist whose expertise lies in the analysis of masculinity, claims that:

The entire toy industry in America was largely Jewish, from the company founders and executives to the designers and factory workers, from the wholesale distributors, the army of salesmen, to the retail outlets and the large department stores that sold them.

He then gilds the lily by adding children’s book authors, comic book authors, and child therapists to the mix, leading him to conclude that the Jews “invented childhood,” along, presumably, with sex (Hollywood) and fashion (the garment industry).

Playmakers is filled with memorable characters—Mr. Potato Head, Busy Biddy Chicken, Betsy Wetsy—who linger in the mind long after they’ve disappeared from the shelf. Their back stories are entertaining, too, even if Kimmel sometimes makes a bit too much of them. In a series of lively case studies, we read, for instance, of Joshua Lionel Cohen, whose invention of the eponymous electric toy train not only enabled immigrant Jews to envision travel as a “space of assimilation,” where Jews sat side by side with those of different backgrounds, but also “virilized” the imagination of boys and their fathers.

We learn, too, of how Morris Michtom, the creator of that first woebegone-looking teddy bear, also went on to manufacture indestructible dolls, boasting “you can’t break these doll heads with anything short of a sledgehammer,” as if this was a concern of young doll owners. One of his competitors, the self-styled Madame Beatrice Alexander Behrman, who made a softer, more pliable alternative, also puts in an appearance.

Playmakers asks some of the right questions. What did immigrant status and Jewish identity have to do with the making of train sets that chugged away, and dolls dressed in the latest fashions? But the book’s answers fall short. Bringing to bear the usual suspects—the American Dream, assimilation, straitened circumstances—Kimmel rehashes rather than advances a novel theory: blame the mothers. Nearly all toy inventors, it seems, had messy childhoods, motivating them to develop the playthings that would make for a happy one.

Plausible? Sure. But is that enough of an explanation? Were Jewish childhoods uniquely bad? In the end, accounting for the Mitchums, the Cohens, the Behrmans, and their ilk’s success as toymakers isn’t what inspired Kimmel to tell their stories. His book is a throwback to the filiopietistic sensibility that once characterized much of American Jewish history writing, a celebration of yet another way in which immigrant Jews and their offspring contributed mightily to the fashioning of a modern America.

Readers in search of proof texts that confirm the Jews’ place in the United States will delight in the book’s richly researched pages, even if the batteries aren’t included.