These traditions mostly pertain to close relatives of the deceased and their friends and neighbors who seek to comfort them. Judaism encourages those less closely connected to join the mourners in recounting the virtues and good deeds of the dead. Following the recent death of Bernie Marcus, z”l, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Home Depot, it seems appropriate to do just that. Born in Newark, New Jersey to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1929, Marcus’s story is very much an American Jewish one. Glenn Rifkin writes:

His father was a cabinet maker, but the family struggled financially during the Great Depression. His mother, who had crippling rheumatoid arthritis, was nevertheless his main influence.

Mr. Marcus earned money for college as a busboy at a Catskills hotel. During his final year at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he believed he had received a scholarship to Harvard Medical School. He was shocked when he was told he would need to come up with $10,000 in order to enter Harvard, which had a quota on Jews at its medical school.

This turn of events did not interfere with Marcus’s worldly success, which made many others wealthy as well. By giving stock options to its original employees, Home Depot produced some 3,000 millionaires. Marcus was also a devoted and generous philanthropist. The foundation he established, writes Rifkin, “has given more than $2.7 billion to organizations supporting medical research, Jewish causes, free enterprise, veterans’ initiatives, national security, and children’s health.”

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.