Philip Pacanowski

 November 13, 2007

Dina Rabinovitch, a former LSE student and Beaver journalist, died last month after a long struggle against breast cancer. She was 44.

Rabinovitch, the daughter of a rabbi and a practising Orthodox Jew, studied International Relations at the LSE and wrote about the arts, especially theatre.

After graduating from the LSE, she began work on a short-lived arts and culture magazine and later wrote for the Independent, the Guardian and Jewish Chronicle. Her friends at the LSE remember her as being ambitious, bright and certain to do well. While a journalist for The Beaver, Rabinovitch was runner-up in the Guardian’s Student Journalist of the Year award.

She joined the newly launched newspaper the Independent in 1986 as deputy features editor, leaving to become a freelance journalist due to family commitments.

As her health deteriorated due to breast cancer, she wrote columns for the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle about her health challenges. Her blogs would detail news of her breast cancer treatments, as well as snippets about her family life and personal anecdotes.

Rabinovitch’s writing on cancer was described in her Guardian obituary as “remarkable”. The Independent noted that “what marked out her writing was an absence of self-pity”. Her frank and warm accounts of living with cancer won her a huge following, with Cherie Blair an open admirer.

This year, she published a book called “Take Off Your Party Dress: when life’s too busy for breast cancer”. Proceeds from the book raised more than £70,000 for a cancer research centre.

Rabinovitch is survived by her husband Anthony and her eight children.