Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book “The Message,” he writes of a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023. The message is composed of four different essays. One is about a trip to Senegal. One is about a trip to a place where his book was banned. But it is the essay about Coates’s time in the West Bank the really anchors the collection.

Coates, by virtue of who he is, cannot write a book about Israel and the Palestinians without it becoming a major media and even ideological event. But his own project, as he tells it, was to go to this place that he had grown up hearing about. This place that he had been told was too complicated for him to understand and to figure out what he thought of it, to take seriously what he would see. And what he saw shocked him.

This book has been criticized for not being a whole picture, and it’s not a whole picture. There is much that is left out even on the Palestinian side that I think could be there, should be there. We talk about that. At the same time, when I went to the West Bank, what Coates saw is what I saw, too. Compared to other things you can read, think, Coates’s rendering of how Israel and Palestinians got here, I think it leaves a lot out. But his rendering of where here is, at least for Palestinians living in the places he visited, is a lot sharper and less clouded than most of what I’ve seen. As always, my email. ezraklineshow@nytimes.com.