Surprise: The guy who calls himself The Fat Jew is kind of obnoxious
In recent weeks, Josh Ostrovsky, a.k.a. The Fat Jewish, a.k.a. The Fat Jew, has emerged as a sort of millennial boogeyman, taking all of the internet’s darkest, laziest, most attention-whoring impulses and manifesting them into one marginally talented loudmouth with ridiculous hair. The main charge against Ostrovsky is that he is a habitual joke thief, taking quips other people have posted on Twitter and Instagram and reposting them—frequently verbatim—without giving credit to the original author in a particularly egregious example of the dreaded “content aggregation.”
Now Ostrovsky has told his side of the story in an exclusive interview with Vulture, in which he refers to his schtick of scamming his way onto VIP guest lists by making a spectacle of himself as “performance art” and himself as a “Renaissance man of pop culture.” (It’s fine that he doesn’t attribute the content on his Instagram page, because he sat in a hot tub full of pasta one time. Performance art!) He also referred to his brand of rosé, twice.
If Ostrovsky has any real feelings about all the shit that’s been thrown his way online lately, he’s hiding them beneath a thick protective layer of irony. In the interview, he refers to his “army of interns working out of the back of a nail salon in Queens … I need them to bathe me” and says, “I was drinking a daiquiri nude and looking at the internet” by way of explaining how a tweet by comedian Davon Magwood ended up on his Instagram account verbatim. He goes on:
I don’t think it’s a matter of good or bad. To me, it’s a matter of logistics. It’s a matter of trying to make it right. He reached out and was like, “Dude,” and I was like, “Dude,” and gave him credit. That’s what I want. I’m into funny stuff, and he’s probably a really funny guy. I want him to get followers, and he got followers off that.