American · 1938–2006
Zola Levitt (1938-2006) was an American writer, broadcaster, and Messianic Jewish Bible teacher. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family in Pittsburgh, he trained as a musician at Duquesne University and Indiana University before a friend from Campus Crusade for Christ persuaded him to read the New Testament in 1971. He emerged from that reading convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, a conversion that reoriented the rest of his career. In 1979 he founded Zola Levitt Ministries in Dallas, producing the long-running television and radio program Zola Levitt Presents and the newsletter The Levitt Letter, both aimed at explaining Jewish tradition and biblical prophecy to a Christian audience. A classical dispensationalist, he read the modern state of Israel as fulfilling biblical prophecy central to the end times. Over his career he wrote roughly 100 books, including Israel, My Love and Jews and Jesus, blending personal testimony with popular apologetics for Christian Zionism.