The willingness of devotees of humanitarian or environmentalist causes to endorse the most vicious anti-Semitism has by now become evident to anyone paying attention. It is also nothing new.
In the late 19th century, hats decorated with feathers—and especially ostrich feathers—were considered the height of style among American women. Jews at the time played an outsized role in the trade in ostrich feathers, a fact that was not lost on the Audubon Society, which began the first major public campaign to protect animals. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes:
Alarmed by what they took to be the pillaging of America’s natural resources to satisfy the whims of the fickle consumer and horrified by the cruelty to animals that sustained it, a band of well-heeled women sought to protect the country’s avian wildlife by putting an end to the traffic in feathers.
That both branches, the high end and the inexpensive end, of the industry were manned largely by Jews didn’t help matters. Nor did the observation in a 1905 editorial titled “Aliens,” in Bird-Lore, the [Audubon] society’s house magazine, that the “foreign-born part of our cosmopolitan population are giving the Association a great deal of trouble and some hard work. They seem to have an inconquerable [sic] desire to kill something, and no respect for the law.” And if that weren’t enough to put you off your feathers, the notion that the “foreign-born” were somehow impervious to nature’s charms did the trick.
Once in the hands of the Audubon Society, it didn’t take much for the wearing of feathers to be construed as un-American.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/fur-feathers-in-out-fashion