$10 million gift from Jonathan and Polly Levine reshapes the future of life at ASU, raising their overall philanthropy to approaching $100 million to date

Jonathan and Polly Levine didn’t set out to make headlines when they stopped by Hillel at Arizona State University’s aging student center on South Mill Avenue.

But standing in a lounge that can barely seat eight people around a table, in a building unchanged since 1981, they saw something that moved them to write one of the largest checks any Hillel chapter in the country has ever received.

The $10 million naming gift from the Levine Family Foundation lands atop ASU Hillel’s “A Home for our Next Generation” campaign, an effort to raise $25 million for a new, 30,000-square-foot Jewish student center to replace the organization’s current 3,700-square-foot home.

With roughly $5 million already committed before the Levines stepped in — including $1.5 million from longtime supporters Barry and Barbara Zemel, who have backed ASU Hillel for more than four decades — the campaign has now cleared the halfway mark, with $10 million left to raise.

“This is a really historic moment for Jewish life at Arizona State University and in the Valley, to have a flagship facility like this that welcomes students from all backgrounds,” said Debbie Yunker Kail, ASU Hillel’s executive director. “It’s going to be a symbol that we’re here and that our community believes in its students.

When the community members invest in this project, it’s so much more than a building; it’s really investing in the Jewish future.”

To understand why the Levines were positioned to make a gift of this size, it helps to go back a generation.

Jonathan Levine is the son of William S. “Bill” Levine, the Phoenix investor who co-founded Outdoor Systems, Inc. in the early 1980s and, working alongside partner Arte Moreno, grew it into the largest outdoor advertising company in North America before selling it to Infinity Broadcasting/CBS in 1999 for roughly $8.3 billion in stock and assumed debt—one of the defining media deals of that era.

That fortune has quietly underwritten some of the most significant Jewish philanthropy in the country.

Bill Levine and his late wife, Ina, funded the Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus in Scottsdale and, in 2014, gave $25 million to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum—at the time the largest single gift in the museum’s history, an act of generosity that led the institution to rename its education arm the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education.

Bill Levine went on to serve on the museum’s presidentially appointed governing council under President George W. Bush.

Jonathan has carved out his own path in the family’s core industries, real estate and outdoor advertising.

He’s president of Keim, Inc.; general partner of Levine Investments L.P., co-founded American Outdoor Advertising in 1996, and became a co-owner ofPacific Outdoor Advertising in 2016 .

He also serves as a director of his father’s William S. and Ina Levine Foundation, which has for years directed the bulk of its grantmaking toward Jewish schools, temples, and causes across Arizona.

His wife, Polly, has her own footprint in the Valley as the founder of Chestnut Lane Fine Foods, and the couple has been fixtures at major Jewish communal fundraisers around Phoenix, appearing as titanium sponsors of the Valley of the Sun J’s annual gala.

So while the check for ASU Hillel came directly from Jonathan and Polly, it arrives as the latest chapter in a family giving tradition that traces straight back to the billboards their father built.

“The Levines have been supportive of Hillel in the past, and when Jonathan and Polly came to see the building most recently, they were really excited to hear what was going on with the capital project,” Yunker Kail said.

“Being in the building, they were able to see what limitations our facility has, how it’s limiting the types of community that we’re trying to build, and the potential of what we could do with something new.”

“We are honored to support a new and expanded Hillel center on the campus of ASU that will serve students for years to come,” Jonathan Levine said. “A larger home for community, learning, leadership, and connection will allow Hillel to enrich the lives of Jewish students”.

What the gift actually buys is striking on its own terms. The new building, planned for Hillel’s current site at 1012 S. Mill Avenue in Tempe will be roughly eight times larger than the current facility—30,000 square feet against 3,700—with room for flexible casual gathering space, a kosher catering kitchen, a coffee shop, a social hall built to host large holiday meals, and a rooftop chapel and garden meant for outdoor Shabbat dinners and holiday services.

“We want a lot of different things to be happening in the building all at once—study groups, meetings, classes that Hillel is teaching, students, studying or hanging out independently,” Yunker Kail said.

“If we know anything, we know the Jewish community is quite diverse, so having a space where Jews can gather and do all different types of things under one roof is really one of the main ways that we show what it means to be a Jewish community.”

The building’s classrooms and meeting spaces are also being designed with an eye toward renting them out to organizations beyond Hillel itself. “We are designing this with an eye towards rentable space for the whole community,” Yunker Kail said.

“The spaces that we’re building are important for students, but they’ll also be available for the whole community to use to gather.”

There’s a multiplier baked into the Levines’ gift, too: it includes a dollar-for-dollar matching component, meaning every additional donation to the campaign effectively doubles the impact on the remaining $10 million goal.

ASU Hillel is already courting donors for a slate of other naming opportunities in the new building—the lobby lounge, a multipurpose room, the chapel, the gardens, and the kitchen—hoping to ride the momentum created by the Levine gift.

“Fundraising is really active now, and we’re eager to be in a new space as soon as possible,” Yunker Kail said.

“This is a way that community members can show their commitment to the next generation of Jewish leaders. There’s going to be a lot of opportunities for local community members to participate, as well as ASU alumni from around the world.”

No construction timeline has been set.

But with more than half the campaign now funded and a matching gift actively attracting new commitments, ASU Hillel’s leadership made it clear they intend to move from raising money to breaking ground as quickly as the remaining pledges allow.