The wisdom of the Talmud says that the person who saves a life, saves an entire world. This saying, made iconic by the movie Schindler’s List, is also a principle that stretches beyond the physical saving of a person’s life, it is a tenet of Judaism. Such is the case with David Lange, who back in 2000 at the tender age of 26, immigrated from Australia. A year later he was married to Ahava Emuna, (Hebrew for “love and faith”) and within 8 years the young couple were the proud parents of five children.
Doing whatever he could to make ends meet and provide for his young family, David also found time to pursue his passion of writing. In the days before social media, he stumbled across the concept of “blogging.” To his surprise yet delight, when he tried it out and wrote a blog about the Australian cricket team, it was met with approval by enthusiasts.
David realized he could use his passion and talent of writing to make a difference. When he wrote about a Hamas terrorist it caught the eye of someone back in his native Australia. From then on, the world was his oyster, and Israel, was in the middle of the Second Lebanon War. Aware of anti-Israel media bias, he started to blog in real time about the war. Providing updates every few minutes, he often pipped at the post the likes of the media giants, the BBC and CNN.
Thus, “Israellycool” was born, a blog that went on to become the most popular English resource about Israel. 15 years later, the website has a massive 3 million visitors a year, an extensive online archive and even photographs which David amassed to debunk the lies and slurs against Israel.
He is often the man behind the breaking news; probably because he is so committed to the cause that he barely sleeps. The biggies in the Israeli English media, such as the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel, have used his groundbreaking scoops to push the stories around the world. His CV is juicy: he has exposed the hypocrisy of Linda Sarsour, caused a global stir in academia by digging up antisemitic tweets posted by a Rutgers professor, Michael Chikindas, and to the glee of his readers, nicknamed Ahed Tamimi, (the blonde haired, blue-eyed brattish “Palestinian” teenager) “Shirley Temper,” because she made a living and found fame by kicking Israeli soldiers. Last year he was included in a Jerusalem Post list that cited the most influential Jewish people in the pro-Israel world of online advocacy. This is no small feat. Making this even more remarkable, is that David wrapped up these scoops while nursing his wife Ahava Emuna, who tragically passed away in 2019 after battling cancer for seven years.
Just like his wife’s name and nature, David too lives his life with faith and love. He does so with resolve and with an absence of pathos or sentimentality. He is effective because he is astute. So as not to alienate readers, he keeps his own political cards close to his chest. It frees him to work towards his goals, which is not to preach to the pro-Israel choir, or to air Israeli society’s own frustrations and shortcomings to a hostile world, but rather to present the reality and necessity of being pro-Israel. Aside from exposing antisemites, he mostly aims at the “middle man,” those who are ambivalent and uniformed. Yet this is more than strategy. In doing so, he knows that if he can change one person’s mind, he is not saving a life, he could be saving an entire world.