WALLIS ANNENBERG

Wallis Annenberg was born on July 15, 1939, in Philadelphia, into one of the great Jewish publishing dynasties in American history. Her grandfather Moses Annenberg had built his for tune in newspapers. Her father, Walter Annenberg, expanded that empire into a media colossus, owner of TV Guide, Seventeen magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and became one of the most consequential Jewish philanthropists of the twentieth century, giving hundreds of millions to Jewish institutions and funding Operation Moses and Operation Exodus, bringing Ethiopian and Soviet Jews to Israel. When Wallis eventually took the reins of the Annenberg Foundation in 2009, she carried all of that legacy forward and made it entirely, unmistakably her own. 

Under her leadership, the Annenberg Foundation distributed more than $3 billion to over 2,800 nonprofit organizations. Wallis’s fingerprints are on the skyline, the schools, and the cultural life of Los Angeles in ways that will outlast any single building bearing her name. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. The Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Mon ica. GenSpace in Koreatown. PetSpace in Playa Vista. The Annenberg School of Nursing at Los Angeles Jewish Health in Reseda. 

For the Jewish community specifically, Wallis’s giving was sustained, purposeful, and personal. She served on the advisory board of the USC Shoah Foundation and in 2007 was honored with its Ambassadors for Humanity Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in Holocaust remembrance. She funded the Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship through Yiddishkayt, a residency for Jewish artists and scholars exploring Jewish history in Eastern and Central Europe. In her final years, as antisemitism surged across Los Angeles and the country, she directed the foundation’s resources toward Jewish community security with the same purposeful clarity that defined all of her philanthropy. 

The ADL’s west division vice president called her a visionary philanthropist whose commitment to equity and community transformed the very fabric of Los Angeles. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s CEO remembered her boundless generosity, creative spirit, and deep devotion to causes that made the city more beautiful, inclusive, and compassionate. Mayor Karen Bass said simply: Los Angeles is stronger because of her. 

““The Annenberg family’s loss is a loss shared by the entire Jewish community, where the work sustained by her thoughtful gener osity, most recently to support community security and our fight against antisemitism, remains as a testament to her lifetime of commitment to the Jewish people.” — Aram Goldberg, Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, July 2025 ”

And she gave to Jewish causes because she understood that the community she came from needed strong institutions to survive and thrive in a world that had not always welcomed it. 

Wallis Annenberg passed away on July 28, 2025, just thirteen days after her eighty-sixth birthday. She did not fight antisemitism with confrontation or legislation. She fought it the way her family had always fought it: by building things that last, by investing in the institutions that protect Jewish memory and Jewish life, and by making Los Angeles a city where Jewish culture is not merely tolerated but celebrated. She understood that strength is not always loud. Sometimes it is a building. Sometimes it is a fellowship. Sometimes it is three billion dollars quietly directed toward the things that matter most. May her memory be a blessing.