The late Jewish journalist Lucette Lagnado. Photo: website. 

The veteran Jewish journalist Lucette Lagnado has passed away, it was announced on Thursday.

The death of Lagnado at the age of 62 was announced by the Jewish Book Council, which awarded her its Sami Rohr Prize in 2008 for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, a memoir of her father’s life and journey to America that focused on her Egyptian Jewish origins.

Lagnado subsequently wrote  another memoir, The Arrogant Years, which relayed her mother’s story.

After leaving Egypt in the turmoil that followed the rise of the dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, the family eventually moved to the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Lagnado, who battled with cancer from her teenage years, graduated from Vassar College and started her reporting career at a community paper in Brooklyn.

A passionate and prolific writer on Jewish issues, Lagnado’s reputation was enhanced early on by her 1991 series on the inhuman medical experiments carried out by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. These articles later became a co-authored book, Children of the Flames.

At The Wall Street Journal, which she joined in 1996, Lagnado was a cultural and investigative reporter, most recently covering health care, health delivery for the poor and uninsured, and new treatments for cancer.

Lagnado is survived by her husband, journalist Douglas Feiden.