When Jessica Tisch was appointed as New York City’s police commissioner last week, it was the first time many people had heard her name. But now that you know it, you may start seeing it everywhere. The industrious and philanthropic Tisch family is the 43rd richest in the United States according to Forbes, with members owning the Loews Corporation and the New York Giants.
The Tisch name graces university and hospital buildings across the city and country. Jessica Tisch’s grandmother Wilma “Billie” Tisch was a longtime member of the WNYC Board of Trustees and was instrumental in the station transitioning out of city ownership and becoming an independent nonprofit. She is still an honorary board member to this day. (Gothamist and WNYC are part of New York Public Radio).
Jessica Tisch, however, has spent her career as a government insider. She got her start in the police department after graduating from Harvard in 2008 with a dual law and business degree. She later became commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and most recently headed the city sanitation department.
As Jessica Tisch begins the tough work of leading the country’s largest police force, here are five facts about her family’s history in this region.
Her grandfather was a police chaplain
After she was sworn in, Tisch told an audience at police headquarters that she was holding the police badge her maternal grandfather Philip Hiat wore as a police chaplain in the New York City Housing Authority Police Department in 1972. Hiat was a Reform rabbi.
An NYPD spokesperson did not know how long Hiat held the police chaplain position. The NYCHA Police Department merged with the NYPD in 1995 and records are difficult to obtain, the spokesperson said. While Hiat’s obituary doesn’t mention his service years or rank, they are mentioned in his daughter’s 1972 wedding announcement.
According to an NYPD spokesperson, the shield is now on Tisch’s desk at police headquarters.
Her family name was shortened for basketball cheers
Tisch’s family immigrated to the United States in 1904 from Ukraine, according to an essay written by her uncle Andrew Tisch. The family patriarch, Avraham Tichinsky, attended the City College of New York, where he was captain of the school’s basketball team, Andrew Tisch wrote.
“The cheer ‘Go Tisch’ was certainly catchier than ‘Go Tichinsky,’” he wrote.
Tichinsky-turned-Tisch then got into real estate, purchasing two summer camps in Blairstown, New Jersey where his sons, Larry and Bob, Jessica Tisch’s grandfather and great uncle respectively, worked before they amassed the family’s fortune. The family sold the camps in 1946 and bought a New Jersey hotel, using the profits to buy more hotels in the area, according to news reports.
Her family’s wealth nearly doubled between 2015 and 2024
Forbes ranked the Tisch family as the 43rd richest in the United States. It reported that the family’s wealth grew from $6 billion in 2015 to more than $10 billion this year.
Larry and Bob Tisch purchased Loews Theatres in 1959 and turned it into a conglomerate with holdings in insurance, hotels, energy and packaging, according to news reports. Bob Tisch co-owned the New York Giants. His son Steve now co-owns the team.
The family’s business model is to buy failing companies and turn them around, netting the gain in the company’s stock price. Jessica’s grandfather Larry Tisch famously did this with CBS, first saving the broadcasting network from a hostile takeover, though he was later accused of selling off the company’s valuable music and publishing assets, according to his New York Times obituary.
As political donors, the Tisches spread the wealth
On top of vast philanthropic spending, the family also donates to political campaigns across political leanings. Locally, the family has donated to both progressives like former Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin and conservatives like U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, according to campaign finance data.
Members of the Tisch family spent $117,000 in candidate donations during the 2021 citywide elections. Most of the money went to mayoral hopeful Raymond McGuire, an investment banker who advanced to the sixth of eight rounds in ranked-choice voting. Several of the Tisch family members split their funding between candidates. For example, Jessica Tisch’s father James Tisch gave Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia $2,000 each. Merryl Tisch, her mother, gave Adams, Garcia, Scott Stringer and Andrew Yang $2,000 each.
Tisch married in grad school in a ceremony performed by her grandfather
Jessica Tisch married Daniel Levine in 2006 while she was still pursuing a master’s degree in business administration and a juris doctor at Harvard. According to their wedding announcement, they were married by her grandfather, Hiat.
Tisch speaks often of her two children: Harry, 13, and Larry, 9.
Levine is a hedge fund manager and a partner of Tenfore Holdings, a venture capital firm focused on software development.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
