Rami Elhanan and Mazen Faraj are members of the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grassroots group that unites bereaved Israelis and Palestinians who have lost immediate family members to the Middle East conflict. Together they promote a message of dialogue, reconciliation, and peace.

Geneive Abdo, Iran analyst at the Century Foundation, talks about the religious dimensions of Iran's political crisis and the challenges it poses for the Islamic Republic’s cleric-run establishment.

"Criticism of Israel indicates engagement with Israel. American Jews should be worried when their children stop criticizing Israel," says Professor Steven Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry on the faculty at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

Read more of the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly interviews with American Jews about Israel.

It was a week of prayers and pleas for peace and gestures of reconciliation to all sides in the Holy Land.

"People never thought they would stay so long, for 60 years," says Olfat Mahmoud, director of the Women's Humanitarian Organization. There are some four and a half million Palestinian refugees. Many live in the West Bank and Gaza, while others took refuge in Arab states such as Lebanon.