Billie Tisch, first woman elected to lead New York's Jewish federation, dies at 98

Wilma 'Billie' Tisch, a philanthropist and matriarch of one of New York's most prominent Jewish families, died on Sunday, June 7, 2026, at her home in Manhattan at the age of 98. Born Wilma Stein in 1927 in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, she grew up in Asbury Park, graduated from Skidmore College in 1948 with a degree in economics, and that year married Laurence Tisch, who with his brother Preston Robert Tisch built the Loews Corporation from a theater chain into a major conglomerate.

Her philanthropic work began in 1962 on the board of Blythedale Children's Hospital in Valhalla, New York. That led her to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, which she joined in 1969 as a member of its distribution committee, the body that decides how charitable funds are shared among agencies. She chaired the committee from 1975, and in 1980 she became the first woman elected president of the federation, which then funded more than 100 hospitals, child-care centers, homes for older people and other agencies serving some two million New Yorkers.

As president she helped lead the federation through a key phase of its merger with the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York, completed in 1986. Today UJA-Federation of New York is one of the largest local charities in the United States, with activities in more than 70 countries. Tisch was also a trustee of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, received the Louis Marshall Medal from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and chaired the board of WNYC, guiding the public radio station's move from city ownership to independence.

After the deaths of her husband in 2003 and his brother in 2005, she and her sister-in-law Joan Tisch oversaw the family's philanthropy, whose name appears on NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Tisch Hospital at NYU Langone. Colleagues remembered her as a mentor who pulled younger people and women into leadership and treated everyone, from board members to the clients of social service agencies, with the same respect.