Speaker 1: What do you got three new potato piles, mister potato bird,
Speaker 1: mister potato fish, and mister potato bugs. That's a funny
Speaker 1: potato bugading me and Jahn. That's a nice potato fish.
Speaker 2: Follow caw.
Speaker 1: I like your potato bird doings that simple? Let's see him,
Speaker 1: mister potato birds, mister potato but mister vocato bet mister
Speaker 1: potato head and his pals.
Speaker 2: Ha ha ha.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish contributors and
Speaker 3: contributions to American popular culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman and I'm
Speaker 3: Jelly Angelfield producer engineer Mike Tomran is working somewhere behind
Speaker 3: the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of a Dot
Speaker 3: Caverine Cargation for Humanistic Judaism, the Jewish Museum of the
Speaker 3: American West, and Atheist United Studios. Hey, Joey.
Speaker 1: Some of the most.
Speaker 3: Important names to me growing up didn't belong to people,
Speaker 3: but to toy companies, names like Hasbro, Mattel Kinner, Toy Biz,
Speaker 3: and Galoob. Unknown to me at the time, these toy
Speaker 3: companies and many others were founded by Jews. We're happy
Speaker 3: to chat with Michael Kimmel, the Sunny Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Speaker 3: of Sociology and Jedder Studies at Stonybrook University, whose latest
Speaker 3: book is Playmakers, The Jewish Entrepreneurs who created the toy
Speaker 3: industry in America. Michael, welcome to Amusing Jews.
Speaker 1: Well, nice to be with you guys. Thanks.
Speaker 4: You're a sociologist with expertise in men and masculinities? What
Speaker 4: led you to write about toys?
Speaker 1: Retirement? For one thing? So I'm professor emeritis and in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty I retired and COVID hit, and I've started
Speaker 1: thinking like what's my next writing project? And and all girl.
Speaker 2: All.
Speaker 1: During my childhood there was a photograph on my piano
Speaker 1: at home, and it was a photograph of an older
Speaker 1: man with a very well known child actress on his
Speaker 1: on sitting on his knee. Now I knew, and everybody
Speaker 1: knows who Shirley Temple is, but I had, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't really know who the guy who's on whose
Speaker 1: lap she was sitting was was. And my mom told
Speaker 1: me that he was Mars mcdum, and he was he
Speaker 1: was himself a famous man, and I thought, okay, I
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about it. So here I am sitting there, going,
Speaker 1: what am I going to write my next project about it?
Speaker 1: I said, maybe I'll write about him. He has a
Speaker 1: really interesting story. So I began to dig found out
Speaker 1: some more of his story, and so and so that
Speaker 1: was the beginning of the book was simply, I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell my family story. It's going to be about
Speaker 1: one hundred pages long, and I'm going to basically find
Speaker 1: out everything I can about where he grew up in
Speaker 1: the in you know, in in uh well, in the
Speaker 1: Minsk district of what's now Belarus, how he made it
Speaker 1: to the US, what he you know, what he did,
Speaker 1: and and and that'll be it. It'll be a short
Speaker 1: family story. Uh And then I sort of plunged in
Speaker 1: and was instantly way over my head.
Speaker 3: Well, of course his story has a lot to do
Speaker 3: with the Teddy Bear, if you want to tell us
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 1: So Mars's story, he was a younger brother. His older
Speaker 1: brother Harris, was taking over the you know, the the
Speaker 1: the family farm in in in the schedtle that they
Speaker 1: lived in, and and so Mars was prime for the
Speaker 1: Russian army. So his family staged a mock funeral, declared
Speaker 1: that he had died of typhus, and they staged a
Speaker 1: mock funeral, buried a coffin filled with rocks, and he
Speaker 1: quietly slipped over the border, ended up as so many
Speaker 1: did in Vilnius. My great grandfather, uh how Trus, my
Speaker 1: great great uncle Marris and his wife Rose, all came
Speaker 1: to the US around the same time, ended up in
Speaker 1: Castle Garden. In about eighteen ninety two ninety three, Mars
Speaker 1: and Rose his wife opened a candy store in the
Speaker 1: bedsince the I wasit neighborhood in Brooklyn, the candy store
Speaker 1: was a very important neighborhood institution, sort of think of
Speaker 1: the barbershop in the black community in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: or so. It was the center of social life. Everybody
Speaker 1: hung out there. It used to be. By nineteen hundred
Speaker 1: it was probably the only place around that had a telephone.
Speaker 1: So if you got a telephone call, people would go
Speaker 1: to your apartment or your tenement knock on your doors
Speaker 1: that you have a phone call. You go down, you
Speaker 1: go to the candy store and pick up the phone. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: and the candy store also was the place where you
Speaker 1: bought newspapers. Morris being having that a failed rabbinical student
Speaker 1: read them all, and in one day in nineteen oh two,
Speaker 1: he was reading the newspapers and he saw a cartoon
Speaker 1: that showed Theodore Roosevelt standing there with a gun and
Speaker 1: in the background was somebody holding a little bear cub.
Speaker 1: And the story was that Roosevelt had been in the
Speaker 1: South adjudigating a boundary dispute between Louisiana and Mississippi, and
Speaker 1: afterwards he was tired and he said, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: bear hunting in Mississippi. So he goes bear hunting and
Speaker 1: after a week they find nothing, no bears, and he's grumpy.
Speaker 1: So finally they find this little old strike to be bear.
Speaker 1: They grab it, the dog's corner it. They tie it
Speaker 1: to a tree and they say, come on, tr you
Speaker 1: can shoot this bear. He takes one look at the
Speaker 1: bear and says, I'm not killing that bear now. For
Speaker 1: some reason, along on this trip was Clifford Berryman. Clifford
Speaker 1: Berryman was a cartoonist, the daily cartoonist for the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: and he drew this cartoon of Theodre Roosevelt refusing to
Speaker 1: shoot the bear. And for some unknown reason, I have
Speaker 1: no idea why Marris thought this was adorable. He said,
Speaker 1: the czar was never so nice, and and so he
Speaker 1: decided that, uh that So he said to Rose, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, let's go. Let's go to the basement, put
Speaker 1: together some scraps and material, and let's make a little,
Speaker 1: you know, a little replica of this bear that t
Speaker 1: R had refused to kill. They put it in the
Speaker 1: window of the candy store. Fine, everything was going fine,
Speaker 1: and people came by and said, that's really cool. What
Speaker 1: is that? They said, well, you know the story they
Speaker 1: were at here of Theodore Roosevelt. They said, I want one,
Speaker 1: and suddenly they began to everybody wanted them. So so
Speaker 1: apparently now this is that's that part we know is true.
Speaker 1: What we don't know is the next part, which is
Speaker 1: kind of family myth. Mars and Rose called it Teddy's
Speaker 1: Bear and wrote to Roosevelt and said, hey, we'd like
Speaker 1: to make these, and we'd like to use your name. Said, okay,
Speaker 1: if we call it Teddy's Bear. And Roosevelt apparently said,
Speaker 1: and this is the myth, marcause this letter has never
Speaker 1: been found, but apparently he wrote back on White House stationary,
Speaker 1: I have no idea if my name would be of
Speaker 1: any value in the bear business, but you're welcome to
Speaker 1: use it. And that's the origin of the Teddy Bear.
Speaker 1: That's how Teddy Bear started was my great great uncle
Speaker 1: Mars and his wife Rose Micdum in a candy store
Speaker 1: in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn when you asked me, like,
Speaker 1: why do you write this book? Okay, that's as far
Speaker 1: as I got. And I thought, and if you ever
Speaker 1: ever tried to, like done research or try to write
Speaker 1: a book, one of the things that happens is you
Speaker 1: reach a point where you say, Okay, I'm at the
Speaker 1: end of my knowledge here. I don't know anything more.
Speaker 1: And yet there was a question that I was facing,
Speaker 1: which is what else was going on in toyland? What
Speaker 1: are the other toy companies? As if I had not
Speaker 1: asked that question, you would not have the book. I
Speaker 1: asked the question, and I said, okay, let me find out.
Speaker 1: How come there's no history. It's the American toy industry, right.
Speaker 1: So I started to look and it turned out that
Speaker 1: all but one of the major toy companies and at
Speaker 1: the turn of the twentieth century were founded by first
Speaker 1: generation Jews. Now, for you guys, I just want to
Speaker 1: be clear I used the term first generation to refer
Speaker 1: to those who were born the first generation born ear
Speaker 1: born of immigrant parents, very poor lower East side tenements,
Speaker 1: you know, had nothing, but they had this. They had
Speaker 1: these ideas about what they could do and what niche
Speaker 1: they could fill, and that's what they did. So I'm talking,
Speaker 1: for example, about the Hasbro the Hassenfeld brothers who land,
Speaker 1: who came first to Rhode Island and made bags out
Speaker 1: of scrap material. Then they made doctor kits, and eventually
Speaker 1: their first toy was potato Head Mattel, which grew up
Speaker 1: where you guys live, which really was founded in the
Speaker 1: post war Europe to take advantage of the exploding plastics industry.
Speaker 1: But at the turn of the century, all the doll
Speaker 1: companies Aaron B F and B, Louis Marx, Lionel Trains,
Speaker 1: every single one of them from Madame Alexander Dolls, all
Speaker 1: of them were founded by first generation Jews. So I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, this is a story I never read.
Speaker 1: I bet I now, I so, okay, I want to
Speaker 1: now I want to find out about it. So that's
Speaker 1: what that's that's how the book started.
Speaker 3: I think some of you're alluding to and why there
Speaker 3: may be is this lacuna in the history of Jews,
Speaker 3: is that, just like comic books, took a long time
Speaker 3: for that history to be written. And now it's fairly
Speaker 3: well known. You know, toys generally speaking, are considered disposable,
Speaker 3: especially from a historian's PERSPECTI I who look for more
Speaker 3: serious things. And the whole idea of like looking at
Speaker 3: material culture of a more commercial or a more you know,
Speaker 3: mass produced perspective is fairly new. And your book is
Speaker 3: is a great you know, I hope first study, because
Speaker 3: this should be an entire field as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1: It was also that it wasn't until fairly recently that
Speaker 1: historians have even begun to think about childhood and history
Speaker 1: and childhood as having a history, and you know what
Speaker 1: childhood was like? And you know, I think that what
Speaker 1: these what these first generation Jews did was they basically
Speaker 1: furnished it. They basically created the material culture for children.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't until even like the nineteen seventies that
Speaker 1: really in the US there are histories of childhood. And
Speaker 1: when you do histories of childhood, you have two things.
Speaker 1: You have to deal with, how children could, what children consumed,
Speaker 1: and how it was sold to them, and so I
Speaker 1: feel like that was there was a big gap.
Speaker 3: Mister Potato had coming from Hasbro. He always was pretty Jewish.
Speaker 1: Saying that is really interesting because you know, if you
Speaker 1: lived in Europe, the story of Morris mcdim and the
Speaker 1: Ideal Toy Company and the teddy Bear would be a
Speaker 1: completely different story. People in Europe believe that the Steife
Speaker 1: Company invented the teddy bear because they were already a
Speaker 1: well known to Most toys in nineteen hundred in the
Speaker 1: United States were either handmade, homemade rag dolls and little
Speaker 1: wooden toys and stuff full toys or imported from Germany.
Speaker 1: Germany was the center for the entire toy industry in
Speaker 1: the Western world, and so so you would hear that
Speaker 1: Stiff invented the teddy bear, although Morris seems to have
Speaker 1: invented it a year or two earlier. But Steife had
Speaker 1: all the marketing muscle in the beginning, so they had
Speaker 1: the distribution. So I credit them. They made a great
Speaker 1: teddy bear. But if you look at the difference, there's
Speaker 1: a picture in the book of the Steife teddy Bear
Speaker 1: and the Victim teddy Bear, and it's impossible to look
Speaker 1: at the two of them go. You know, the Steiffe
Speaker 1: bear is very is standing, you know, head up like this,
Speaker 1: and the Teddy bear that's in the Smithsonian, the ideal
Speaker 1: teddy bear. He's sort of slumpy, he's sort of sitting.
Speaker 1: He has a frown, and you think, you know, he
Speaker 1: looks Jewish.
Speaker 4: Enjoying the show, Click like and subscribe. Although your book
Speaker 4: mostly centers on Eastern European Jewish immigrants, there's also a
Speaker 4: part of it that's about the department stores and their
Speaker 4: part in the popularization of toys. Can you tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit about that?
Speaker 1: Sure, you know, there's a big debate about how the
Speaker 1: German Jews received the Eastern European in Yiddish Jews. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, the German Jews who came in the
Speaker 1: middle of the nineteenth century were middle class and upper
Speaker 1: middle class. They were quite prosperous. They assimilated very quickly.
Speaker 1: And then in the eighteen starting in the mid eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: suddenly these two point five million of these Yiddish speaking
Speaker 1: any Lists or Steatle Jews arrived and a large number
Speaker 1: of the German Jews were We're not them, no, no,
Speaker 1: they're like Jews, We're Americans, and you know, they wanted
Speaker 1: nothing to do with them, and they wrote these kind
Speaker 1: of disgusting critiques of stettle of tenement life because they
Speaker 1: wanted to distance themselves. There were many other German Jews
Speaker 1: who founded all the Hebrew charities that as people streamed
Speaker 1: off of these frigates, said you have any skills, here,
Speaker 1: we have a place for you. Here, you have any money,
Speaker 1: we can we can find you a bed here, any relatives.
Speaker 1: So there was all of the Jewish charities in the
Speaker 1: at the turn of the century were found were founded
Speaker 1: by the German Jews. And that's really those Eber charities
Speaker 1: is really the origin of the whole field of social
Speaker 1: work in New York. In the nineteen tens and twenties.
Speaker 1: At the same time, many of those German Jews founded
Speaker 1: the all of I mean almost all of the premiere
Speaker 1: department stores in America. And I'm not just talking about
Speaker 1: like Bloomingdale's or Toys r Us or Fao Schwartz, but
Speaker 1: within five years of its founding, Macy's and I Magnen
Speaker 1: and Abraham and Strauss and Berghoff, Goodman and Gimbals. So
Speaker 1: what these these Jewish toymakers had was was they had
Speaker 1: their relatives and friends as the sales force. But they
Speaker 1: had a place to sell. And once that, once that
Speaker 1: you know, kind of manufacturing infrastructure was in place, they
Speaker 1: had they they had a pathway to you know, the
Speaker 1: kind of upward mobility that they were seeking. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, I guess you guys you know, will
Speaker 1: appreciate this, of course. I mean, the whole book is
Speaker 1: really an assimilationist story. These poor people come off the
Speaker 1: boat and they're thinking where do we fit in? Like,
Speaker 1: how can we make it in this place? And they
Speaker 1: found a niche, They helped each other and and they
Speaker 1: had an already existing infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very similar, like we were saying with comic
Speaker 3: books or the music or film industries, where you had
Speaker 3: these outsiders who used a vacant sort of field, something
Speaker 3: that wasn't attractive to the the elite, and through their
Speaker 3: contributions to it, created a culture that they themselves could
Speaker 3: live in.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So that's the that's the truest.
Speaker 1: It's like an.
Speaker 3: Active assimilation if that makes sense, very very much.
Speaker 1: But to introduce the comic books, I think you have
Speaker 1: to add another element to the equation, and that element
Speaker 1: is of course anti Semitism, because the story of the
Speaker 1: Jewish comic book artists was they all want they won't
Speaker 1: want her to be artists and go into advertising. But
Speaker 1: in the thirties and forties, the advertising business in New
Speaker 1: York City was very white shoe It was very Protestant.
Speaker 1: They didn't like Catholics, and they certainly didn't like Jews.
Speaker 1: So these guys would show up to the ad agency
Speaker 1: with their portfolio and the company and the guy interviewing
Speaker 1: them would say are you Jewish? And guy would say yes,
Speaker 1: he said, okay, we have our quota of Jews. Sorry,
Speaker 1: now that quota may have been zero, but so Jews
Speaker 1: are you know you know that phrase, you know, when
Speaker 1: life gives you lemons, make lemonade. So Jews are the
Speaker 1: ultimate lemonade makers. Like, Okay, we can't go into advertising
Speaker 1: as artists, all right, we'll, you know, we'll start our own.
Speaker 1: We'll go to the pulps, we'll start doing it. We'll
Speaker 1: start doing art there, sort of like the way that
Speaker 1: in Hollywood, you know, Jews, you know, Jews said you
Speaker 1: won't let us into your country club. Okay, we'll start
Speaker 1: our own. So what I'm what I'm trying to say
Speaker 1: is you can't understand this story simply by this kind
Speaker 1: of wide eyed vision and you know, finding a niche.
Speaker 1: It's also confronting anti Semitism and finding a way around
Speaker 1: it and through it.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly. And those fields were open largely because they
Speaker 3: were disreputable, and that's where the Jews could go because
Speaker 3: it wasn't guarded by all the moneyed interests of the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know murder Incorporated.
Speaker 4: For example, as you mentioned, you connect toys to other
Speaker 4: child centric industries like the comic books, parenting magazines, and
Speaker 4: children's literature. Why is this context important?
Speaker 1: So as I was writing this book, my second question
Speaker 1: after I did all this stuff about the early toys
Speaker 1: was where did they get their ideas for toys? And
Speaker 1: one place they went was the comic strips. Comic strips,
Speaker 1: you know, in newspapers were I mean everybody read them.
Speaker 1: They had millions and millions of readers every and and
Speaker 1: some of the most famous ones like Joe Peluca drawn
Speaker 1: by Ham Fisher, a first generation Jew, or Lil Abner,
Speaker 1: the most famous comic strip of you know, probably of
Speaker 1: the century before Phenuts was drawn by al Cap, a
Speaker 1: first generation Jew who actually never set foot in the South.
Speaker 1: He uh, you know, but so what what I don't
Speaker 1: know if you ever read Lil Abner as a kid,
Speaker 1: but I did. And it's Mammy and Pappy yoakum in
Speaker 1: dog Patch and his rural. Basically it's a seddle in Appalachia.
Speaker 1: He just transposed the whole thing. So so I'm now.
Speaker 1: And then of course comic books and the derivatives of
Speaker 1: comic books like Mad Magazine and you know, all of
Speaker 1: those other and the novelties. So all of these are
Speaker 1: first generation Jews, including this was a big surprise to me. Carousels,
Speaker 1: the carousel horses and lions in every major amusement park
Speaker 1: in the country were carved by Jews. They were the
Speaker 1: guys who carved you know, in like Central Europe. You
Speaker 1: know the arcs in the synagogue that as the lions
Speaker 1: around the arc. These are the guys they left. They
Speaker 1: came here, they needed a job, and some guy very
Speaker 1: wisely in Coney Island said We're gonna make a carousel,
Speaker 1: you know, come work for me. So so even the
Speaker 1: horses and lions of carousels. And then in the middle
Speaker 1: of all this I, you know, I stumbled on this list.
Speaker 1: The near Public Library had a list of one hundred
Speaker 1: most important children's books of the twentieth century, and forty
Speaker 1: two of the authors of those were first generation Jews.
Speaker 1: I said, well, that's interesting, you know. So then I
Speaker 1: started looking at the histories of some of those children's books,
Speaker 1: and they all have these amazing stories, not only you know,
Speaker 1: I mean the obvious ones like Sendek and Ezra. Jack
Speaker 1: Keats's snowy Day Curious George is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: stories because you know, it's literally but a couple living
Speaker 1: in Paris. You know, the story of furious Georgia and
Speaker 1: the Germans are coming through from Belgium, moving down into
Speaker 1: into France from the set from the north and the east,
Speaker 1: and the night before they arrived, you know that great
Speaker 1: scene of the German troops marching down the Chauncyse. They
Speaker 1: the night before Marguerite at Margaret and Hans Ryerbach grab
Speaker 1: some bicycle parts, put together these bicycles and ride south
Speaker 1: and west into Spain, eventually to Lisbon and come to
Speaker 1: the US. And in their backpack is that is the
Speaker 1: drawing of this crazy impish monk whose name was Fifi,
Speaker 1: and they get here and they find a publisher of
Speaker 1: children's books, and the publisher says, let's change fefe, you know,
Speaker 1: like and that's how Curious George was born. So in
Speaker 1: a way, Joey, this is why this is important because
Speaker 1: when I read these books, when I was reading these
Speaker 1: books to my kid, I didn't know it had a
Speaker 1: backstory like this. And I want parents and grandparents to
Speaker 1: know the backstory of Snowy Day or or you know,
Speaker 1: or or Frog and Toader Friends, or all of those
Speaker 1: books that you had read to you when you were
Speaker 1: a little kid.
Speaker 5: They have these backstories, including Eloise. For God's sake, I
Speaker 5: mean Eloise, your boys. So you probably didn't read Eloise
Speaker 5: when you were a kid.
Speaker 1: But Eloise lives on the tip on the tippity top
Speaker 1: floor of the Plaza Hotel, right, and she's as waspy
Speaker 1: as they can be. And you had no idea that
Speaker 1: Kay Thompson was a first generation Jewet from Saint Louis.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to give the backstory. I wanted you
Speaker 1: to know. I wanted people to know there's a story
Speaker 1: behind this story that you're reading. And it's a really
Speaker 1: moving one, as you're.
Speaker 3: Saying it's all connected, because part of what you convey
Speaker 3: in the book is that all of these things were basically,
Speaker 3: in one way or another, connected to the invention of
Speaker 3: childhood as a phenomenon that wasn't necessarily recognized before all
Speaker 3: of these you know, things for children were being created.
Speaker 1: Why here, why these Jews and why at that time?
Speaker 1: And it turns out that they happened to arrive at
Speaker 1: the turn of the twentieth century, at the very moment
Speaker 1: that progressive idea. Progressivism was beginning to take hold and
Speaker 1: was beginning to articulate a new idea of childhood in
Speaker 1: the first place, ending child labor laws for example, a
Speaker 1: campaign that lasted for quite some time, compulsory school. All
Speaker 1: of these forces were already moving to demarket. In nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall said, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a if you know, kids would grow up and
Speaker 1: after primary school they go to work on the farm,
Speaker 1: they go to work in a factory, they go to
Speaker 1: work in a coma. And he said, you know, kids
Speaker 1: are like are living longer, extending that period before work.
Speaker 1: And he said that the time between primary school and
Speaker 1: the end of high school was what he called Adolescents.
Speaker 1: Nineteen oh four, he wrote this sixteen hundred page book
Speaker 1: about about this new stage of development between childhood and adulthood.
Speaker 1: So you can see how it's elongating. So what were
Speaker 1: these children going to do if they were in school
Speaker 1: and not working and they had so part of it
Speaker 1: was it was good timing. The second thing I think
Speaker 1: is they these these poor steadled Jews. You know, somehow
Speaker 1: they came to this country with you know, these old
Speaker 1: beat up cardboard suitcases held together with string. But they
Speaker 1: had a different idea of what childhood should be. Moving
Speaker 1: backward a little bit, it wouldn't surprise any any of
Speaker 1: your listeners to know that the first kindergartens in the
Speaker 1: US were Jewish. Families flocked to them. The first Montessori
Speaker 1: schools were all filled with Jews. And partly because if
Speaker 1: you look at the child rearing literature from the Middle
Speaker 1: from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: that standard childbearing literature was this, children are wilful. The
Speaker 1: goal of child rearing is to break their will. And
Speaker 1: I mean some of the great books about child rearing
Speaker 1: were things like if your child, if your baby is
Speaker 1: wait up in the middle of the night and is crying.
Speaker 1: Go into their room and give them a good spanking
Speaker 1: and that'll stop. Others like John Watson, the great child
Speaker 1: development writer in nineteen twenty eight, tests to parents, don't
Speaker 1: hug or kiss your child. You can pat your son
Speaker 1: on his forehead when he goes to sleep and shake
Speaker 1: his hand in the morning. And these steadied Jews come
Speaker 1: with this idea from the Talmud that children are creative,
Speaker 1: they're curious, they're to be nurtured, they'd be encouraged, and
Speaker 1: if they're not going to find the stuff to do it,
Speaker 1: they're gonna make it up. So I also think that
Speaker 1: these Jews came with what I would call a different vision,
Speaker 1: a different idea of childhood, and then they created the
Speaker 1: material culture to nurture it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: For some reason, before I read your book, I didn't
Speaker 3: realize that Eric Erickson was Jewish.
Speaker 1: Ah, so this is right. Well, Eric Erison is a trip.
Speaker 1: But so that's the last piece of the book is
Speaker 1: really saying. And the theorist, the great theorist of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, who created developmental psychology, who created child psychology,
Speaker 1: Eric Erickson, Uri Brafenbrenner, Hien Ganad, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kolberg,
Speaker 1: and the dean of all of the Abraham Maslow, all
Speaker 1: of them first generation Jews. Eric Erickson was also a
Speaker 1: first generation self hating Jew. His real name was Eric Comber,
Speaker 1: and he was embarrassed about this, and so he renamed himself.
Speaker 1: And what more American thing can you be than such
Speaker 1: a self made man that he's Eric's son of Eric, right,
Speaker 1: he'll give birth to himself. And this is like the
Speaker 1: greatest theorist of childhood that we have. So yes, that's
Speaker 1: the last piece, is the theories of child development. As
Speaker 1: curious as you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs come not
Speaker 1: just material needs, but emotional ery. It's so Jewish.
Speaker 3: Your book looks at toys chronologically from the turn of
Speaker 3: last century to the nineteen seventies. What are some of
Speaker 3: the major changes you've noticed along the way.
Speaker 1: There were many different changes that happened, among them the
Speaker 1: development of materials, like if you try if you bought
Speaker 1: a doll in nineteen oh five, Let's say the head
Speaker 1: was porcelain and you never played with it. It sat
Speaker 1: on a shelf. And it was the Ideal Toy company
Speaker 1: that created a unbreakable doll head that girls could actually
Speaker 1: play with, and that was a big innovation. Other innovations,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, probably the most important one is
Speaker 1: the television in nineteen fifty five when the when the
Speaker 1: Mickey Mouse Club first aired. It changed the toy business
Speaker 1: because instead of instead of advertising in Look magazine or
Speaker 1: Life magazine or Parade magazine, you could advertised directly to children.
Speaker 1: You could market to them and they would be your salesman.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to tell parents parents children were like this.
Speaker 1: You were able instead to say kids telling your mom
Speaker 1: and dad, do you want this for Christmas? And so
Speaker 1: that was of course, that's a major change. One of
Speaker 1: the things that was interesting to me, you know, Joe,
Speaker 1: you led off by saying, you know that I was
Speaker 1: at my career prior to this book was about, you know,
Speaker 1: was the sociologists of gender and masculinity. And I was
Speaker 1: looking at the at the ads and thinking about the
Speaker 1: way girls and boys played in the nineteen fifties and
Speaker 1: sixties when I grew up, and girls played with their
Speaker 1: dolls and their peers and their girlfriends. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you had your classic tea party, you would have
Speaker 1: two girls and two of their dolls, and the four
Speaker 1: of them would sit at the table and they would
Speaker 1: have And here's what you never saw mom. You never
Speaker 1: saw mother playing with children. Now look at the ads
Speaker 1: for the toys for boys. It's all father son bonding.
Speaker 1: Fathers are completely engaged with their sons. They're playing battleship together,
Speaker 1: They're playing with the model trains, they're having a cat
Speaker 1: And part of that, I think is that. And the
Speaker 1: language of the ads is Lionel Trains makes him feel
Speaker 1: like a man and makes me feel like a boy,
Speaker 1: you know. And these guys are coming back from the
Speaker 1: war utterly traumatized. They're moving into the suburbs. They're wondering,
Speaker 1: like what am I going to do now with my life?
Speaker 1: There's an entire infrastructure being built for them for their return,
Speaker 1: the Interstate highway system, public schools, the GI Bill, to
Speaker 1: help them reintegrate. And one of the ways that they
Speaker 1: did that, I mean you probably there. There's good histories
Speaker 1: of the fifties. It's like, guys develop a hobby, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you should have a all the all these
Speaker 1: suburban guys were learning how to play golf terribly and whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, they they all developed hobbies and one and
Speaker 1: the bonding with their children. I experienced this with my
Speaker 1: own dad. I went out for Little League. Suddenly my
Speaker 1: father decided to become an umpire in Little League. You know,
Speaker 1: he hadn't he hadn't thought about baseball in years. But
Speaker 1: so I think I think that the advertising, the whole
Speaker 1: idea of toys for boys was a bonding experience with fathers.
Speaker 1: And mothers are completely absent in the in the in
Speaker 1: the kind of layout of toys for girls. And that
Speaker 1: one of the reasons, of course for that is Barbie.
Speaker 1: They had an older friend, they had, they had already
Speaker 1: something older than them to aspire to.
Speaker 3: Why is material culture is so important to understanding American
Speaker 3: Jewish history?
Speaker 1: I think Jewishness is really important to the study of
Speaker 1: material culture. There's a ton of studies of material culture
Speaker 1: out there, like what are the things people use to
Speaker 1: make the meaning in their lives? The idea of material
Speaker 1: culture is like what are the things we use? So?
Speaker 1: You know, so like the anthropologists will follow like Levey
Speaker 1: Strauss and look at the way that people eat and
Speaker 1: how they put silverware and where they put it in,
Speaker 1: and the raw and the cooked. How come we have
Speaker 1: different words for raw foods and cooked foods. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, all of those have to do with culture
Speaker 1: and class. And I felt like, we know that there's
Speaker 1: a material culture of childhood because we know that there's
Speaker 1: the children's books and the comics and the toys they
Speaker 1: play with and the ways they play with them, and
Speaker 1: people study that, and I wanted to say, hey, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, this also has an ethnic an ethnic foundation
Speaker 1: as well as a developmental one, and that's the story
Speaker 1: that's not been there and I think was really important.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Michael for joining us.
Speaker 1: Really a pleas where to be with you guys.
Speaker 3: And to our audience. Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
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