Bicycles hang from trusses on a color-changing ceiling and a 10-foot-tall Mr. Potato Head presides above, as light pours through a circular window, which evokes an Alexander Calder mobile, into a vast hall at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.
“This is the physical representation of the web-based Toy Association Hall of Fame,” Stephen Jacobs, scholar-in-residence at the museum, told JNS of a display at the museum on a recent private tour that ran more than two hours.
Clad in a plaid shirt and half-hexagonal, half-rounded blue glasses frames with an accent stripe, Jacobs, who sports a salt-and-pepper beard, retired in July 2025 after 30 years of teaching game and pinball design and history, as well as free and open source software courses at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Games and Media. (He remains professor emeritus at RIT.)
“What sent me down the rabbit hole is that one of my former rabbis, Rob Morais, now at Temple Anshe Hesed, asked me to help with an exhibit on the role of play, toys and games in Jewish religious and secular life at the Shalom Street Museum in Detroit,” he told JNS.
Aware that there were “like five famous companies” started by Jews—Mattel, Hasbro and Lionel leapt to his mind—Jacobs told his former rabbi that there ought to be a Jewish toy inventors hall of fame section of the Shalom Street exhibit.
Then he looked at the Hall of Fame portion of the Toy Association website, founded in 1916 as the Toy Manufacturers of America in part to keep toy factories running as makers of essential goods during World War I. (It failed to make the same case during World War II.)
“I started going down the list of inductees. ‘Huh. Jewish name. Jewish name. Jewish name. Eastern European name, maybe Jewish,” Jacobs told JNS. “Oh, left Europe for Palestine in ’45? Jew.’”
That was about 12 years ago. He has since found more Jews in the toy industry.
“When I had a list of 100 people and 80 companies over 200 years, I came to my colleagues at The Strong,” he told JNS, gesturing toward the museum display. “They said they knew about 10%, but had no idea the number was this large.”
His research formed the basis of the museum’s online exhibit “The Jewish History of the Toy, Game, Pinball and Video Game Industries,” which is slated to become an in-person show at the Rochester museum next year. He’s also writing a book on the topic.
“I’ve been talking to people about this for 10 years,” Jacobs told JNS, of Jews and toys and games.
“I have had 80-year-old men run away from me in the Javits Convention Center,” in Manhattan, “because they didn’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I’ve had others express real discomfort with the fact that even now I wanted to talk about this.”
“That was 10 years ago, now it’s much worse,” he said. “A lot of people don’t want to talk because they feel unsafe or are afraid of boycotts.”
‘Stand together’
“Play is fundamental to any kind of learning, not just for us humans. Some animals play as well,” Jacobs, a recipient of a Shine a Light on Antisemitism Civic Courage Award from the Jewish Education Project in 2025, told JNS.
“Learning is key to Judaism, making play is key to Judaism as well,” he said. “There are Jewish educators creating specifically Jewish games of all types and bringing game nights into synagogues.”
Playing with others “builds community in and out of a Jewish context or focused on a Jewish game,” according to Jacobs.
“Especially in these times, community is important. These communities can and should be both Jewish and non-denominational,” he told JNS. “The Jewish community needs to stand together but cannot stand alone. Relationships are always key, especially in times of crisis.”
Jacobs co-founded a Jewish Developers special-interest group at the International Game Developers Association with game developer and entrepreneur Sam Glassenberg. And he said that Penina Hoffnung, family engagement specialist at Beth Tzedec Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Toronto, runs a group called JEDLab Meeple for several hundred Jewish educators interested in games.
His work and that of others is based, in part, on the principle “common to all marginalized groups,” that “visibility is important,” he told JNS.
“Shining light on the roles that Jewish creatives have had in this space gives Jewish youth a set of exemplars to emulate and educates the non-Jewish world in more ways that Jews have had a positive impact on the world,” he said.
FAO Schwarz, not a Jew!
The tour upon which Jacobs led JNS of various luminaries identified in the Toy Association Hall of Fame recalled Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” of mostly, but not entirely, Jews.
Leslie (“Les”) Berger (1919-2014) arrived in New York City at 19 “with just $7 in his pocket,” as the association puts it, after his family sent him stateside to flee the Nazis in his native Hungary. Shortly after he arrived in the Big Apple, the Nazis killed his whole family.
He went on to create Cardinal Industries, which made “mah-jongg sets, dominoes, poker chip racks and hula-hoops,” in a small loft in Brooklyn, N.Y., per the association. His slim, self-published biography is titled The Saga of a Lucky Man.
Jacobs directed the attention of JNS to serial entrepreneur Jack Friedman (1939-2010) of LJN Toys, the video game studio THQ and JAKKS Pacific, whose products included toys and games licensed from other creators and companies, including Cabbage Patch Kids, Hello Kitty, Pokémon, Care Bears, Barney, Sesame Street, Smurfs, Atari, Star Wars, Marvel characters and Disney Princesses.
Arthur “Spud” Melin (1924-2002) and Richard Knerr (1925-2008), of Wham-O Toys, “born into a Jewish family, as we say these days,” Jacobs told JNS, of the two who sold products including Frisbee, Limbo Stick, Silly String, Super Ball, Slip ’n Slide, Hacky Sack and Hula Hoop.
The tour also included Russell Berrie (1933-2002), of Fuzzy-Wuzzies and the license for the Troll dolls, who ran a philanthropic foundation. In 1998, Fortune magazine identified Russ as one of the 40 most generous Americans. Arnie Rubin (born 1947), who co-created the Imperial Toy Company and founded Funrise Toy Corporation (Tonka Lights and Sounds emergency vehicles), per the association, which adds that Rubin is a board member of the Jewish Braille Institute.
Frederick August Otto Schwarz (1836-1911), of FAO Schwarz, was not Jewish, Jacobs told JNS. “I found an article from the Times of Israel that said that he was,” Jacobs said. “So, I said he was, and I got in trouble.”
One of the new inductees, Stanley Weston (1933-2017), who was born Stanley Alan Weinstein, created G.I. Joe. The Jewish inventor is known as “the father of the action figure,” per the Toy Association.
After conceiving what would become G.I. Joe in 1963, he sold the rights to Hasbro for $100,000, “paving the way for one of the most iconic toy franchises in history,” it adds.
Sydney Rosen (1917-2011), of Rose Art, which made crayons and toys, was an active supporter of March of Dimes, Hadassah and the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), and Reuben Klamer (1922-2021) created The Game of Life. Lionel Weintraub (1920-1994) was a vice president of Ideal Toy Corporation, which sold toys, including Rubik’s Cube, and three toys designed by Jews: Mouse Trap (Marvin Glass and Associates), Ker-Plunk (Eddy Goldfarb) and Magic 8 Ball (Abe Buchman).
He also noted Beatrice Alexander Behrman (Madame Alexander Doll Company); Edwin S. Lowe (Bingo and Yahtzee); Isaac Larian, “who is Iranian Jewish” (Little Tikes, among others); and Charles Lazarus, founder, and Michael Goldstein, later an executive and chairman, of Toys “R” Us.
Jeffrey Breslow, Howard Morrison and Rouben Terzian (Ants in the Pants and Brain Warp) started working for Marvin Glass Associates and later formed their own company, BMT (Big Monster Toys).
Others include Merrill Hassenfeld, and his sons Alan and Stephen (Hasbro); Melissa & Doug Bernstein (“Your kids or their friends probably have Melissa & Doug toys,” Jacobs said, of the newly inducted Hall of Fame members); Albert Steiner (who founded Kenner Products Company with his brothers Joseph and Philip); and Morey W. Kasch, “who’s here because he was the IT guy who helped all the toy companies go digital in terms of inventory and stuff like that,” Jacobs said.
Joshua Lionel Cowen (Lionel trains), Charles Raizen (Transogram Toys and Games) and Nathan Greenman (Greenman Brothers, Inc wholesalers and distributors) were also Jewish. “The wholesalers, the distributors—also a very high percentage of Jews in the industry, but you can only cover so much,” Jacobs told JNS.
“The thing that really motivated me about this stuff was not the kind of, ‘Woah. Jews also made the toy industry. They didn’t just make the film industry!’” he told JNS. “It was that the stories of all these people are so crazy.”
“There are such amazing stories; that’s what drew me in,” Jacobs said. “That’s the story that I wanted to write, to do this work with the exhibit here at the museum—both online and the physical one that should be out about this time next year.”
The Strong show venue, which has 350,000 square feet of exhibits, has no peer when it comes to its size and scope, according to Jacobs.
“In terms of something that looks at play and is a history museum of play, The Strong is the largest one,” he told JNS, “even though it gets listed under the children’s museum umbrella a lot.”
“We collect toys, games, dolls, pinball and video games as the core of an overall mission to explore and preserve the history of play and promote play’s vital role in all our lives. There definitely are some museums that are focused on one aspect of it,” he told JNS. “There’s the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin for computer games. In Nuremberg, there’s the Nuremberg Toy Museum, which is a federal museum.”
The Nuremberg institution, like Margaret Woodbury Strong’s museum, “has its origins in the collections of a wealthy woman that got moved out of danger’s way during World War II,” Jacobs said. The Nuremberg one became an official state museum later on.
‘Running joke’
The Torah reading on the first day of Rosh Hashanah notes that the forefather Isaac was named because God had performed a tzchok, something amusing, for his mother Sarah, and that everyone would “laugh along with me.” Also in the High Holiday reading, Sarah asks Abraham to banish Hagar and her son Ishmael, because the latter is mitzachek, some form of mockery or levity, which some rabbinic commentators connect to misachek, or “playing.”
One of the central prayers of the High Holidays, Unetaneh Tokef, thought to date to the 11th century, refers in a list of among other things that are written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur, to times of leisure.
“Who will live and who will die?” the author of the prayer writes, in part. “Who will rest, and who will wander aimlessly?”
Another indication that the solemn high holidays and play might be more connected than one might imagine is a reference on the YIVO website to children playing with “little figures,” made of candle wax, on Yom Kippur. It wasn’t clear when and where that tradition developed.
“It reminds me of the jesters of Ta’anit,” the Talmudic tractate, “who when they see people depressed, cheer them up,” Rabbi David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, and scholar-in-residence at the Maimonides Fund, told JNS.
“They are worthy of the world to come,” Wolpe told JNS. “Relieving sorrow is a sacred task, and sometimes it is done through jest, through games, through blessed distractions.”
Michael Kimmel, distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and of gender studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America, published earlier this year.
Kimmel’s ancestor, Morris Michtom (1869-1938), was the founder of the Ideal Toy and Novelty Corporation and created the teddy bear, and licensed and manufactured the Shirley Temple doll, among other toys. (Kimmel did some of his research for the book in the archives and collections at The Strong.)
“I think the story of the Jewish dominance in the toy industry has to do with stories of resilience, assimilation and good timing-good fortune,” he told JNS. “The early toy makers were very poor on the Lower East Side. They had nothing, but they had entrepreneurial moxie and were not to be deterred by antisemitism.”
“They also had a different view of children than the mainstream Protestant child-rearing experts, and so they sought to create toys and novelties that their own children would like,” Kimmel said. “Their ideas about child rearing coincided with the Progressive movement—campaigns for compulsory education, ending child labor—which created an actual time, a space, for children to be children.”
It “didn’t hurt,” he added, that middle-class German Jews “had founded all the department stores that would eventually sell their toys.”
Kimmel doesn’t think that toys and games have Jewish holiday stories. “These guys thought they were creating ‘American’ toys, decidedly not Jewish toys,” he told JNS. “They’d changed their names, named their children ‘American’ names and sought to discard a lot of the remnants of their pasts.”
He wrote the book to call attention to Jewish involvement in toys and games and to explain the “Jewish backstory” and how “they were the creations of these Yiddish-speaking tenement Jews.”
“It is the book I wished I had been able to read that would tell me what Neal Gabler said about Hollywood,” he said. (Gabler penned the 1989 book, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.”)
Writing the book was a lot of “why didn’t I know this before?” he told JNS.
“Every day of this research provided a revelation,” he said. “My family would laugh and roll their eyes when I would come upstairs to make dinner, and I would share my latest ‘discovery.’ Popeye was Jewish! Curious George had a Holocaust backstory.”
“It became a running joke in the house,” he said.
Letting kids be kids
Back in Rochester, Jacobs told JNS that the United States lagged far behind Germany when it came to making toys. The first U.S. toy stores and companies came in the late 1800s, at which point there were hundreds in Germany, and the first U.S. toy trade show drew some 10 exhibitors in 1903.
The United States also lagged some 50 to 60 years behind Germany when it came to adopting kindergarten, which was first created in Germany, Jacobs told JNS. “We were also very late in terms of getting kids to be kids and go to school versus working on the farm or factories,” he said. “Our federal child labor laws were 100 years after Germany’s.”
The timing was ripe for Jewish immigrants in a nascent toy industry, and “there was no, ‘We don’t hire Jews’ in the industry,” Jacobs told JNS.
“The whole institutionalized antisemitism in the United States started to decay after the Holocaust,” he said.
Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel “Gentleman’s Agreement,” and the Academy Award-winning film of it released that same year, told of a writer pretending to be Jewish to write about antisemitism. That “also helped reduce institutionalized antisemitism,” Jacobs told JNS. “Ironically, the film producer Daryl Zanuck was inspired to adapt the book because he was denied membership in a Los Angeles country club, because it was assumed he was Jewish. He wasn’t.”
When Jacobs publishes his book project on Jews and toys, he plans to open with a quote from Sam Stern, “who was instrumental in the pinball industry.”
Sam’s son Gary Stern “ran Stern Pinball, the only existing pinball company for a big piece of the last 30 or 40 years,” Jacobs told JNS. “Gary asked him at one point, ‘Pinball, why?’ And Sam said, ‘What was I going to do, go work for IBM?’”
Jacobs estimates that 60% of those in the toy and game industries found their way into that profession, while about 40% dreamed of that job from when they were kids.
“I’m going to say 60-40,” he told JNS. “I won’t swear on the sacred book 60-40, but you have people who had some other business, who then saw that toys and games were really hot.”
The Hassenfeld family, which is Jewish, was in the “literal rag trade, meaning that they got their start selling remnants, not fashion,” and branched into school supplies, according to Jacobs.
“The dollhouse furniture did better than other projects,” Jacobs told JNS. “The Hassenfelds were making toy doctor and nurse and air raid warden kits when George Lerner came to them with Potato Head.
Hassenfeld Brothers (later Hasbro) sold more than a million units in its first year alone, bolstered by its television ads, the first for any toy and the first aimed at children, not their parents.
The Handlers, founders of Mattel and also Jewish, worked in plastics and made furniture and picture frames, including dollhouse furniture.
“Then you have the people who wanted to be in toys from the ground up,” he said. That included Marvin Glass (1914-1974), whose company Marvin Glass and Associates (MGA) designed Mouse Trap, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Lite Brite, Operation and Simon.
“He wanted to be in toys from the get-go,” Jacobs said. Louis Marx, who started in the business as an office boy at 15, started his own company in 1919 after his World War I service and shared a Time magazine cover with Santa in 1955, because his company was the biggest in the world. His company licensed Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots from MGA.
He paused in front of a display for the first Star Wars action figures and a large cardboard certificate, and told JNS it contained “a two Jewish company story.”
The Jewish-founded action figure company Mego had made action figures successfully, including the ones for Star Trek, but passed on the Star Wars license, miscalculating its value.
Negotiations for the license took so long that Kenner wasn’t able to deliver the actual toys for Christmas, so Kenner, founded by three Jewish brothers, got the contract and issued an “Early Bird Certificate Package” that parents could put under the tree for kids. “And then you mail it in between Feb. 1 and June 1, 1978, and you’ll get them before they hit the store,” Jacobs told JNS.
‘We don’t have the war chest’
From the Middle Ages until World War I, Germany was the gold standard of toy makers. But tariffs and other laws meant to keep German goods out of the country, and the Depression and more tariffs and blockades of foreign goods during World War II, meant that the center of gravity of the toy industry moved to the United States.
“And the fact that most factories in Germany got bombed out of existence,” Jacobs told JNS.
Before World War II, there were 29 Jewish-owned toy companies in Nuremberg alone, including Bing Brothers, one of the largest, and the influential J. W. Spear & Sons.
“Those guys fled, or their companies got Aryanized, or they ended up in the camps,” Jacobs told JNS. “The expertise was lost.”
Bing was so big that it went under before World War II, “because the Depression took it down,” he said. When the Toy Association predecessor began in 1916, its big agenda was to keep German and Japanese goods out of the country, so local industry could grow, according to Jacobs.
The late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s saw a “massive” amount of acquisitions, with Mattel and Hasbro jockeying for first position, Jacobs said. He cited the example of Magic 8 Ball, which has passed through several major companies and is now a Mattel product.
He stopped in front of a display of Barbie No. 1 (1959) and No. 3 (1960), which are perhaps the best-known Jewish-made toy, alongside a Bild Lilli doll (1957).
As Jacobs told it, the German newspaper Bild started doing a single-panel comic to fill missing ad space called “Lilli,” also known as “Bild-Lilli” by Reinhard Beuthien. “Depending on who you read and talk to, Lilli was either a gold digger or something more sinister or just a modern girl having fun as a secretary,” he said. “R-rated-ish cartoons.”
Ruth Handler (1916-2002), who was Jewish, had her daughter Barbara in mind when she named it “Barbie.” (Ken was named after her son.) She had seen Barbara preferred playing with paper fashion dolls and thought there ought to be adult dolls. On vacation in Germany or Austria, she saw such toys, Jacobs told JNS.
She bought three, and gave one to Barbara and two to the Mattel research-and-development department.
“It had started as an adult novelty toy sold in cigar shops and bars but eventually became a kid’s toy,” Jacobs told JNS. “At that point, Mattel was so big that even though it was clearly a knockoff,” the original German toy makers said, “We’re not going to fight this. We don’t have the war chest.”
“When Barbie came on the scene, her buoyant mood matched America’s,” a label in the museum display states. “She had money to spend in that booming economic era, and consumers had money to buy her outfits. For her 1959 debut, No. 1 Barbie wore this fetching black-and-white bathing suit and heavy eyeliner. Later versions toned down the makeup for a more teenage look.”
Mattel also sold Hot Wheels, the first 16 of which are on display at the Rochester museum and were direct competitors with Matchbox.
“Matchbox were about meticulous reproduction of factory-released automobiles,” Jacobs told JNS.
Elliot Handler was inspired by the muscle and jacked-up cars in Los Angeles when he envisioned Hot Wheels. The company’s wares were distinct from the toy vehicles that Matchbox made. “Now, Mattel owns Matchbox as well as Hot Wheels, and so they have the whole thing,” Jacobs said.
‘Perhaps pride’
Joshua Schwartz, professor emeritus of historical geography of ancient Israel at Bar-Ilan University and chair of the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority, has written extensively about Jews and toys, including dolls in ancient times.
“I don’t know if ‘pride’ and ‘joy’ are the words I would use,” he said, of prominent Jews in the toys and games industries. “But yes, perhaps pride.”
Such heavy Jewish involvement in those areas might not be a coincidence, according to the professor. “Is there something in the Jewish DNA, as it were, that has influenced this?” he told JNS. “Most Jewish homes—I grew up in New Jersey—had books in their home libraries on Jewish humor, which is related to toys and games.”
“Jews could take serious events and moments and find the humor in them,” he said. “Day-to-day survival depends on turning the serious into humor. Dolls, toys, games are part of it, as long as adults do not interfere—too much.”
Schwartz told JNS that the late former Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef initially forbade dolls that included a full human figure on idolatrous grounds, but later changed his mind and said they were permissible.
“What explains his greater leniency in the later ruling?” he wrote in the recent article “Young Girls and Their Dolls in Judaism,” published in the European Hebrew Journal. “It is hard to imagine that he had learned more about dolls, but he might have realized that the connection to idolatry was rather flimsy.”
He added in the article that Yosef had six daughters, five sons and “numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “It is possible that he really did acquire more awareness as time went on,” he wrote.
He told JNS that dolls which portray Yosef can be found on the market. “Is there not even a degree of humor in his relating to dolls in halachic detail and ultimately permitting them,” he said.
Even the most religiously strict Jewish communities today have “a more open attitude today to dolls,” according to Schwartz. Some deface a small part of the doll, perhaps not even in a visible way, to skirt what they see as Second Commandment problems.
“Scholars, religious and otherwise, are aware of the idolatry history but consider it history,” he told JNS. “Even the most religious have other issues to oppose. Dolls after all are for girls, and those communities relate in that manner.”
In ancient times, rabbis of the Talmud played with children. “There was a time and a place for everything, including play,” Schwartz told JNS. “When there were problems, such as co-ed games, then the halachah worked around it. When toys may have caused problems on Shabbat, then they also found ways to work around it, or just allowed those that did not cause problems and the others were good for weekdays.”
The Jerusalem Talmud suggests that Tur Shimon, a mountain some five miles west of Jerusalem, was destroyed because people played with balls. Some commentaries say that meant people playing with balls in violation of the Sabbath.
Play, toys and games “are more than play, toys and games,” Schwartz told JNS.
“Show me what toys and games your children have and how they play with them, and I will tell you what kind of family you are,” he said. “Children and adults learn in various ways. Play is one of them.”
“Even God plays,” he added, citing Proverbs 8.
‘I had that’
Growing up, Jacobs played Monopoly, Mouse Trap and Backgammon, all of which are on view at the museum in Rochester.
“The primary experience if anybody comes in here is, ‘I had that’” or “‘Oh, daddy used to play it,’” he told JNS.
He directed the attention of JNS to a section on pinball machines, where he noted that David Gottlieb, who owned an eponymous pinball company and is considered the creator of modern pinball, was Jewish.
The Strong has several of Gottlieb’s machines as well as his first, Baffle Ball. The museum also gets one game from Stern Pinball upon release, continually growing its collection of those machines.
An extensive pinball exhibit at the museum shows the evolution of the units, from gravity-fed ones without flippers to the introduction of bumpers and then electric games. People “iterated like crazy” in a short period of time, just 16 years, designing the look, feel and major components of modern pinball machines, Jacobs told JNS. (Like all coin-operated machines, which are all cash businesses, organized crime was drawn to them for money laundering, he said.)
When Roger Sharpe, who is Jewish, demonstrated in court in 1976 that pinball was a game of skillfully operating flippers, he paved the way for thinking about pinball as something other than gambling based on chance.
Another Jewish pinball luminary Jacobs mentioned is Sam Stern, the best salesman at Williams. “He went into Harry Williams’ office famously one day and said, ‘I’m your best salesman. Why don’t you sell me half the business?’” Jacobs said. “Eventually Sam got the whole business and got a jukebox company.”
The video game Pong also has a Jewish story, and the tennis-style game “is part of the great lawsuit that helped create the video game industry,” Jacobs told JNS.
At a time in the early 1960s, when mainframes cost $30,000 or $40,000, software was free. Nolan Bushnell, who created Atari, made a knockoff of the game Spacewar! that had been made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and released into the public domain.
In Spacewar!, two spaceships try to shoot each other while rotating around a black hole. It has a warp button. It was a hard game, “especially if there’s never been anything like this,” Jacobs said.
Bushnell decided to commercialize it. “It does OK, but it doesn’t do great, because nobody’s ever seen a video game before,” Jacobs said. “The whole thing with the black hole and all this rotating. Forget it.”
At a Magnavox dealer showcase, Bushnell saw a pre-release version of the first home video game console, the Odyssey, created by German Jewish inventor Ralph H. Baer, and played its tennis-style game there.
Unlike Spacewar!, the game was patented by Sanders Associates and licensed by Magnavox. When Bushnell created Pong based on the Odyssey’s game, Magnavox took Atari and Pong to court.
“Bushnell says, ‘Oh, you know. We’ve already done an arcade video game, and we invented that, and we came up with this thing on our own,’” Jacobs said. “Except Bushnell signed a guest book to get into the dealer demo, and so they say, ‘No, you didn’t.’” The license fee was $5 million, “which was nothing compared to what Atari was going to make,” he said.
“My students used to say, ‘How did you get to be a video game historian?’” Jacobs told JNS. “I said, ‘I was born in 1961 and so was Spacewar!’” he added, with a laugh.
Baer, who also created Simon, is known as the “father of the video game,” and his Manchester, N.H., workshop is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington. The Strong Museum has his lab from his summer home in Florida on display, as well as the papers from his electronic toy consulting business.
Near a Commodore 64 display, Jacobs told JNS that the founder of the company that made the computer, Jack Tramiel, was a Holocaust survivor. The computer is the “best-selling desktop computer of all time,” according to Guinness World Records.
“The exact number of C64s sold is unclear. Commodore founder Jack Tramiel estimated between 22 and 30 million units, Commodore’s official estimate was 17 million units, while a credible modern estimate puts the figure at around 12.5 million units,” the site states. “The C64 is still the most popular single model of desktop computer, even with the most conservative numbers.”
Tramiel and his family had lived in the Lodz Ghetto until it was dissolved. After coming to America, he joined the Army, was trained in typewriter repair and started his own company at the end of his enlistment, which eventually became Commodore Business Machines. He also got into calculators and later bought a central processing unit company, so he could make computers more cheaply. The Jewish inventor, who was known for saying that “business is war,” likely did more than anyone to get video games into homes, according to Jacobs, because parents figured computers were educational.
Elsewhere in the museum, a circular Monopoly prototype reflects creator Charles Darrow’s round dining room table. He modeled it on the anti-land-ownership Landlord’s Game by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie (neither was Jewish), whom Parker Brothers offered a piece of the action or the right to have the company publish two more games of her invention. Magie opted for the latter, and the games didn’t do well, while the percentage of Monopoly would have been worth a lot of money, Jacobs said.
An official Sesame Street exhibit at the museum includes reference to the Israeli Rechov Sumsum, and a display on World War II addresses the hacksaws, compasses and maps that were smuggled into prisoner-of-war camps via games. (Sesame Street co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney, whose father was Jewish and mother was Catholic, is in the Toy Hall of Fame. Her grandfather was a Jewish immigrant tailor from Germany, Jacobs told JNS.)
A section on “moral panic” explores censorship of comic books, and the now-abandoned research of Jewish psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who wrote about comic book violence “seducing” innocents and whose data was sealed until 50 years after he died.
“I would lecture on this, and then I would say, ‘Why did God make the Jews wander the desert for 40 years?’” Jacobs told JNs. “They would look at me like I’m crazy, and I would say, well, some of the rabbis say that God made the Jews wander for 40 years, so that the generation that grew up as slaves would die off before they enter the Promised Land.”
“How long do these codes last? 40 years,” he would tell his students. “So you guys who are looking at the video game restrictions and ratings, you’ve got about another 10 years.”
‘Best jobs’
JNS asked Jacobs whether Jewish inventors were aware that their coreligionists were also pioneering in toys and games.
“There was, for years, an Israeli Bond fundraising dinner when the toy industry trade show was happening every year. They all knew each other,” he said. “They all competed against each other. Whether they socialized much, went to the same synagogues or whatever is not clear.”
“The Handlers helped create one of the synagogues in Los Angeles,” he told JNS. “There’s a lot of Jewish philanthropy, but there wasn’t anything that indicated that everybody went to Hebrew school.”
In his retirement, he is enjoying seeing what he describes as a “board game resurgence,” driven in part by the Eurogames movement that originally came out of Germany.
One of the best-known games of the movement, whose designers were inspired to create a style of board game less dependent on dice rolls and more strategy-driven, is Settlers of Catan.
They were inspired, in part, by the work of Jewish game designer Sid Sackson and his game Acquire. The Strong has his extensive gameplay journals in its archives and has a portal to them online.
Jacobs told JNS that Rochester has the largest board game store in the United States, Millennium, which has a separate building arena for tournaments. Like the board game resurgence, he is excited about his continued role at The Strong.
“I had the two best jobs in the world,” he told JNS, about two hours into the interview, “between working with kids who are passionate about video games and spending time here.”
