Israeli-American relations are in free fall. Why? On the face of it the key issue is the terms of the draft deal with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry was reportedly ready to sign in Geneva, week before last. Yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated yet again that it is “a bad deal.” And last week Israel’s intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, claimed the concessions to Tehran that the United States is contemplating will funnel between $20 and $40 billion to Iran’s coffers.

Here’s a statistic from an official Pentagon presentation, recently revealed at a security industry conference in Augusta, Georgia. The subject was American military interventions since the end of World War II. The figures: 44 interventions – one a year – between 1945 and 1989; and another 100 – three to four a year – since the end of the Cold War.

Josef Joffe is that rare European: a well-known and respected public intellectual, an academic with sinecures at prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic, the publisher-editor of the left-leaning German newspaper Die Zeit, and a staunch defender of the United States against reflexive and voguish European anti-Americanism.

French President Francois Hollande on Sunday laid out four demands which must be in place for an agreement with Iran to successfully rein in its nuclear program, Agence France-Presse reported. “France is in favor of an interim agreement but on the basis of four points,” AFP quoted him as saying at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Jews across the world must ratchet up pressure on their governments to stand in the way of an impending "bad deal" on Iran's nuclear program, Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett wrote Saturday night. In a letter sent to AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Russian Jewish Congress, and other groups, and later posted on his Facebook page, Bennett said that "the Free World stands before a fork in the road."

How do Israelis who have moved to the United States and made their lives there ensure that their children - and their grandchildren – remain connected to their Israeli identity? That’s the question that Israeli-American community leaders, activists and educators - together with representatives of the State of Israel - were setting out to tackle Sunday as they gathered in New Jersey.

This week at CPD, we hosted Dr. Timothy Potts, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, who discussed the Cyrus Cylinder as a cultural icon and museums as vehicles for promoting global dialogue. Potts shared with us the history and meaning of the Cylinder; a clay foundation deposit no larger than a loaf of bread inscribed following Cyrus the Great’s incorporation of Babylon into the Persian Empire in 539 BCE.