So in Budapest we find Ibrahim, a Syrian refugee who yearns to act, to attain financial success, to be a celebrity. But This is Europe reminds us of the fact that below every system and conflict there are human beings. His narrative style is a form of bricolage: each chapter proceeds through a staccato-like building up of layers of detail based on transcribed recorded interviews written up from the subject’s perspective, retaining quotations, italicising their additional thoughts and memories, trying to retain on the page the living flow of life’s intensity.

Bernstein: Do you think, given the kind of new and very deepening ties between the United States and Ukraine, there will be, following the war, a renaissance in the Ukrainian-Jewish community because of those ties?But it is the life of the truck driver – how he met his girlfriend on the road, for example – that matters. I think we live in a time and in a space and in a technological system that is pushing us all away from each other and into a situation where we know less and less and less about people who are outside of our own direct network. Who makes up this population of 750 million, sprawled from Portugal to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? As we face the concurrent threats of pandemics, climate change, and other existential threats, I spoke with Dougald Hine, author of "At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All Other Emergencies," to discuss how perceptions are changing in response to these challenges.

He is the author of two acclaimed books: Fragile Empire, a study of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and This is London, a book on the British capital. Some of these people turn up in Ben Judah’s This Is Europe, a powerful piece of reportage that develops many of the themes and techniques that he displayed in his groundbreaking earlier work, This Is London. You look at somebody like [Honoré de] Balzac, like La Comédie humaine, you know, it’s just very inspiring to me. They all want to tell their stories and they all think that their stories say something profound and important about Europe today. One memorable chapter tracks a couple – Lyosha and Olya – who met on the frontline in Adviika, Ukraine.The traditional ways of life in Europe are transforming faster, Europe’s cities are transforming faster. We leave with the understanding that to die there is like it is to die anywhere: a fear of leaving a child behind, an appreciation of the little things in life.

I think that Europe is really blurring with Africa and Asia in all kinds of interesting and strange and unpredictable ways. He hears things being said and, even if they are paranoid or semi-literate, faithfully sets them down: “Look what’s happening in London, mate … Zone 1’s being sold to the Russians and Zone 2’s being bought by the poshos. Unlike This Is London, in which you served as a kind of narrator, This Is Europe is told from the vantage point of 23 people you interviewed. His second book, This is London, published by Picador, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016 and for the 2019 Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage.We do our best to provide good quality books for you to read, but there is no escaping the fact that it has been owned and read by someone else previously. Following his prize-nominated epic feat of reportage on the dizzyingly diverse multicultural and migrant underbelly of contemporary London, This is London (2016) — written in the spirit of George Orwell’s classic narratives of proletarian life in the 1930s — Judah has widened his angle of vision to take in Europe itself. Judah has interviewed and profiled French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

All of the great political philosophies—liberalism, socialism, conservatism—they’re all about how we should live.The Europe that we have known and have been used to for millennia is disappearing in front of our eyes, and that really was driven home to me when I was in Burgundy. Over 500-odd pages he presents us with lengthy portraits of 23 “old and new Europeans”, told in what are effectively their own words. British-French author and journalist Ben Judah, who sat down with Jewish Insider last month to discuss the launch of his third book, This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now, joined JI podcast co-hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein to delve deeper into his new book, which traces the impact of immigration throughout Europe, and discuss his writing process and the ever-changing landscape for Jews on the continent.