Insta-schlub
Instagram sensation ‘The Fat Jew’ is really an Upper West Side kid who grew up as Josh Ostrovsky
A t the Cannes Film Festival last month, Sharon Stone partied on a yacht with an ostrich, Justin Bieber serenaded Busta Rhymes with a breathy “Happy Birthday” — and “The Fat Jew,” a pudgy, New Yorker, was at the beach pouring rosé down his belly. Who? The Fat Jew, 30, is a comic Instagram star — with nearly half a million followers — whose birth name is Josh Ostrovsky. He was flown to Cannes by Stella Artois to mingle with couture-clad celebrities at what he calls the most “stupid money” film festival of them all.
Ever since a video of him teaching homeless people “SoulCycle” classes on parked Citi Bikes last summer went viral, the Chelsea resident, who got kicked out of Skidmore, dropped out of NYU and graduated from SUNY Albany, has taken his cult following mainstream.
The 6-foot-2, 250-pounder just sold two scripted shows to Amazon and Comedy Central — he’ll write and star in both. He’s got a book deal, and, oh yeah, Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg are fans.
“Some people say, do one thing and do it well. I say, do many things and do them very mediocrely,” quips Ostrovsky, who will be paid $1,000 to judge a pregnantwomen’s wet T-shirt contest in Tampa, Fla., next month.
Ostrovsky, who makes up to $2,500 for a sponsored Ins- tagram post with one of his signature outlandish captions, is sitting at his favorite West Village gay bar, Julius. He’s not gay — he and his fiancée, publicist Katie Sturino, share a three-bedroom apartment in Chelsea — but he loves the sliders.
His stomach protrudes as he sways to “Moon River” on the jukebox. He’s sporting his “hair erection” — a solid, vertical 10-inch ponytail — and a denim vest, sans shirt, that says “Mazel Tuff ” on the back.
“That’s my motorcycle gang,” Ostrovsky says. “We’re nine Jews . . . weekend warriors, orthopedic surgeons, and on the weekends they’re like, ‘Let’s ride.’
“We’re not going to pop wheelies and get into bar fights. So we ride to Westchester on a nice day and get prosciutto paninis and use hand signals and go the speed limit. Prosciutto is about as badass as we get.” Well, almost as badass. Ostrovsky’s comedy skews toward inappropriate. Last year, he had a Web series called “Hookers Doing Nonsexual Stuff,” where he invited prostitutes over to do things like cook him pasta and re-enact “Braveheart.”
In October, hundreds of fans protested outside Instagram’s NYC offices when he was kicked off the social media site for the third time for posting “explicit content.”
“He’s a cultural icon,” says NYC comedian Scott Rogowsky. “Funny just naturally emanates from his sweat glands. It’s his musk.”
“There’s this sense of discovery with him, like, ‘Oh my God, you’re real.’ People come up to him and just grab his hair,” says friend and entertainment reporter Ben Lyons, who adds that a Cannes street was closed when a group of 12 crying French teenagers rushed Ostrovsky.
To think TFJ’s just a nice Jewish boy who attended the tony Trevor Day School on the UWS and grew up with his radiologist father, nutritionist mother and a younger brother. As a child, he says, he “wanted to go into event planning and do tasteful floral arrangements.” His March bar mitzvah theme was “autumn.”
The Fat Jew says his alter ego was birthed in summer camp. “It came out of a counselor I had who was super fat and identified himself as, ‘a fat Jew.’ ” While Ostrovsky dabbled in “performance art” in college, he started making a living doing it after returning to NYC post-graduation.
He got paid to host parties as TFJ and film himself acting ridiculous. When he joined Instagram in 2012, the fans flocked like never before. He became the Famous Fat Jew. But maybe not fat enough. Recently, he says, “This little Puerto Rican girl ran up to me on Houston Street and was like, ‘You’re not as fat as I thought you were. You need to go right now and get fat.’
“I’m really trying to go for that young Gandolfini look, where I’m fat but taut,” explains Ostrovsky. “But I might just go right now and start drinking Nutella.”