The Ghost Editor by Ariel Horowitz

Ariel Horowitz’s highly anticipated second book, ״The Ghost Editor״, was published last year in Hebrew. Recently, an excerpt from the book appeared in Yardenne Greenspan’s translation in the Jewish Review of Books״, and we are discussing it – along with other related issues – with Ariel.

“The Ghost Editor” is your second book, following ״Our Finest״. How would you describe the thread connecting them?

Ariel: My writing is deeply engaged with questions of power and marginality, fame and fraud, failure and success. These themes run through both books, and I believe they will continue to preoccupy me in future works. There is also a minor character in the first book who briefly appears in the second. But beyond that, ״The Ghost Editor״ is a very different book from ״Our Finest״. I’d say the main difference is the shift from third-person narration to first-person. My first book was written in the third person, with an omniscient narrator unfolding the story, and I deviated from that structure in just one chapter. When I set out to write ״The Ghost Editor״, I felt ready to move to the first person, to narrators telling their own stories, almost as an extended monologue, and the result, in my view, is far more powerful and meaningful.

The third part of “The Ghost Editor” is told from the perspective of Hanan Bar-Ner, a young copy editor. What drew you to this particular point of view?

I spent years making a living as a journalist and book editor, and I was fascinated by the complex position of the editor, especially the copy editor, who sees the inner workings of a text and witnesses the writer at their most exposed: their mistakes, their shortcuts, their blunders. The editor is a marginal figure, but that very marginality also grants them power. I was interested in exploring what could be done with this ambivalent power, what conflicts it might generate. What happens when someone seemingly ‘marginal’ tries to break free from their marginality? Are we even capable of escaping the frameworks and conditioning that define us? These are questions I ask myself constantly, both in life and in my writing.

You’re also working on a PhD. How does your academic research intersect with your literary work?

My dissertation focuses on the concept of redemption in literature and Jewish thought in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the works of Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, and S.Y. Agnon, three writers I deeply admire. In both my literary writing and my research, I find myself doing something similar: telling a story. As a scholar, I write about Agnon, Roth, or Arendt, trying to listen to their voices and identify the questions that preoccupied them. I then try to articulate and explore those questions, hoping to offer a meaningful and original perspective on Jewish existence today, in 2025. Literary writing is not so different: for me, at least, writing begins with an internal drive to understand something, to decipher, to find answers. From there, I construct a world in which the issue that concerns me is given context, voices, and perhaps even resolution.

Ariel Horowitz was born in Jerusalem in 1990. His books ״Our Finest” (2021), and “The Ghost Editor” (2024) were published by Keter Publishing House, became bestsellers and have been critically acclaimed. Ariel is the recipient of the 2024 Levi Eshkol Prize for Hebrew Writers. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, is married, and has a son and a daughter. You can read an excerpt from “The Ghost Editor”, translated by Yardenne Greenspan and published in the Jewish Review of Books, here:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/…/im-eighty-five-years…/

Photography by Rod Searcy