Josh Ostrovsky is just a nice Jewish boy with an affinity for perfectly captioned memes and perpendicular ponytails. At least, that’s what his 4.4 million Instagram followers will tell you. Known as “The Fat Jew” across social media platforms, Ostrovksy’s posts run the gamut from adorable animals in costume to profanity-filled candid photos from all corners of the Internet.
Recently, a new kind of image graced The Fat Jew’s Instagram feed: the cover of his upcoming book.
“Money Pizza Respect,” which hits bookstores everywhere on October 27, laughs at itself from the inside out. The tightly framed greyscale headshot on the cover parodies Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, featuring Ostrovsky with a pensive thumb to his chin offset by his self-proclaimed “Jew unicorn” ponytail and scraggly beard.
The content within its pages promises to be just as facetious. This is, after all, coming from the guy who conducted SoulCycle classes for New York City’s homeless on CitiBikes and watched the Super Bowl laying nude in a giant vat of chili. Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, describes Ostrovsky’s debut book as “one ludicrous story from his life after another,” as well as “the type of absurd photos and captions that have catapulted Josh to insta-fame.”
In the caption of the cover reveal on Instagram, “The Fat Jew” promised that if the book is a raging success, he will legally change his name to “New York Times Bestseller.”
“THAT ALONE SHOULD BE ENOUGH,” he wrote, “NOT TO MENTION THAT THE BOOK CONTAINS MAJOR LOLS.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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