This month marks 67 years since my cousin Raphael Lemkin died in New York, nearly penniless, with only a handful of mourners at his funeral. He had spent everything he had, his money, his health, and finally his life, on a single idea: that the deliberate destruction of a people is a crime, and that the crime deserves a name. 

He gave it one. He coined the word “genocide” in 1944, after the Nazis murdered 49 members of our family. He then almost single-handedly willed the Genocide Convention into existence at the United Nations in 1948. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize repeatedly. He asked for nothing in return, and he received almost nothing in return. What he left behind was his name and the moral precision of the word attached to it.