Illustrated humorous weekly published in Warsaw from March through August 1906. Di bin (The Bee) represented the first attempt by Shmuel Yankev Yatskan (1874–1936) to publish a popular Yiddish newspaper, two months before he launched his successful daily Idishes tageblat. Di bin’s copublisher and editor was Eleazar David Finkel (1862–1918), a talented journalist and translator.
In its first edition, Di bin stated that its goal was to “illuminate all aspects of Jewish life.” The newspaper sought the collaboration of its readers and even promised to pay contributors for publishable jokes. Indeed, most of the newspaper’s contents was humorous—including news items. Di bin covered Jewish politics, strikes and labor disputes in different regions, and items about the contemporary Jewish world. Humor was expressed mainly in feuilletons by Yatskan, in news from the literary world, in actual literary contributions, and in jokes and caricatures. Among the better known contributors were the Hebrew author Yaknehoz (Yeshaye-Nisan Hakohen Goldberg, 1858–1927) and the bilingual author Avraham Leyb Yakubovitch (1882–1964). Despite its novelty and initial success, the paper proved a failure. In the weeks prior to its closure, it appeared irregularly.
Translated from Hebrew by Carrie Friedman-Cohen