The angry public reaction to the attacks on Mosul’s cultural history — including the eviction of Christians by militants, which outraged many Muslim residents who celebrate Mosul’s reputation for tolerance — appears to be the first spark of rebellion against harsh Islamic rule.

Journalist Sulome Anderson, who is half Lebanese, kisses her Jewish boyfriend in a viral photograph posted on Facebook and Twitter -- part of an explosive social media campaign spreading the message: "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies."

This week, a UK-based synagogue hosted its first iftar with members of both the local Jewish and Muslim communities.  With Ramadan being a time of reflection and peace, the Jewish-Muslim interfaith iftar at the synagogue, was a way for “Jewish and Muslim communities to come together in the UK to provide a light of hope for our co-religionists in the Middle East,” according to Mustafa Field, director of Faiths Forum London.

As tensions between Palestinians and Israelis remain high, there is a moment of hope in the middle of everything that is bleak: The father of a murdered Palestinian teenager was consoled by the uncle of a slain Israeli teenager.  "We expressed our deep empathy with their sorrow, from one bereaved family to another bereaved family," said Yishai Fraenkel, the uncle of Naftali Fraenkel, one of three Israeli teenagers found dead after being abducted on June 12.

The disappearance of three Israeli teens in the West Bank last week is being taken as a call to action uniting many disparate elements of the American Jewish community.

Sunday’s gathering of the pope, Peres and Abbas saw delegations of Rabbis (mostly Israeli) and Muslim Imams (mostly Palestinian) sitting in one section of the spacious Vatican garden while high ranking Catholic clergy sat in one long line in another side of the garden.  Facing them, at some distance, to the left and right of the pope, were Abbas and Peres – all three in stately chairs spaced almost embarrassingly well apart.

From the earliest days of his papacy, when he walked slowly into a grand reception hall in the Apostolic Palace for his first meeting with a curious diplomatic corps, Pope Francis has promoted a fairly conventional foreign policy agenda: fight poverty, pursue peace, bridge ecumenical or interreligious divisions and protect the environment. 

About a quarter of the world's population agrees that a number of negative statements about Jews are "probably true," according to a poll aimed at providing a statistical underpinning to the question of how widespread anti-Semitism is globally.  The League said its goal was to create a snapshot of anti-Semitic views in all parts of the world, to find ways to combat it, and to allow future surveys to measure whether, and where, the prejudice is rising or falling.