Michael Kimmel & Renee Rosen

The 35^th Edition of the Book Festival of the MJCCA Presents

Michael Kimmel & Renee Rosen

Author Talk, Q & A & Book Signing

SUPPORT OUR TOY DRIVE FOR AMY’S HOLIDAY PARTY! Please bring new, unwrapped children’s toys for gifting to children who might otherwise go without this holiday season!

MICHAEL KIMMEL, Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America

Playmakers is the first full-scale untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who literally manufactured “the century of the child.”

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom (the author’s great grand uncle and aunt) 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 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The great–grandnephew of the founder of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel is a SUNY distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies and founder of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University. The author of Guyland, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

RENEE ROSEN, Let's Call Her Barbie: A Novel

She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world. Barbie is born in this bold novel by USA Today bestselling author Renée Rosen.

When Ruth Handler walks into the boardroom of the toy company she co-founded and pitches her idea for a doll unlike any other, she knows what she’s setting in motion. It might just take the world a moment to catch up.

In 1956, the only dolls on the market for little girls let them pretend to be mothers. Ruth’s vision for a doll shaped like a grown woman and outfitted in an enviable wardrobe will let them dream they can be anything.

As Ruth assembles her team of creative rebels—head engineer Jack Ryan who hides his deepest secrets behind his genius and designers Charlotte Johnson and Stevie Klein, whose hopes and dreams rest on the success of Barbie’s fashion—she knows they’re working against a ticking clock to get this wild idea off the ground.

In the decades to come—through soaring heights and devastating personal lows, public scandals and private tensions— each of them will have to decide how tightly to hold on to their creation. Because Barbie has never been just a doll—she’s a legacy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Renée Rosen is the USA Today bestselling author of Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl, The Social Graces, Park Avenue Summer, Windy City Blues, White Collar Girl, What the Lady Wants, and Dollface. She lives in Chicago.

Books will be available for purchase on the evening of the event from our partner bookseller, A Cappella Books!

All sales are final. Tickets are non-refundable.