The first story about the relationship between Brenda and Neil seemed the weakest in the collection. The reference to a bump in the nose being a code for a Jewish nose and having a nose job seemed quaint.
I loved the next story about Ozzie called The Conversion of The Jews. The character Ozzie describes his mother with the lines, “Even when she was dressed up, she didn’t look like a chosen person. But when she lit candles, she looked like something better; like a woman who knew momentarily that God could do anything.” He had called the rabbi a bastard saying he didn’t know anything about God. Scene where Ozzie is on the roof and the rabbi screams for him to get done is magnificent. He acts like a martyr-Jesus illusion. He makes the rabbi knell and say God can make a child without intercourse. He tells his mother and the rabbi that they shouldn’t hit him when he’d asked about Jesus. The chilling last line of the story was, “He jumped right into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’ edge like an overgrown halo. “
In Defender of the Faith, Roth examines self-hating Jew which plague Roth thorough his career. The story is about how the Jewish Sergeant Nathan Marx deals with another Jewish solder who’s been complaining about not being given passes on Shabbos or Passover and says, “Why can’t you be like the rest? Why do you have to stick out like a sore thumb?” The solder says “Because I’m a Jew. I am different. Better, maybe not. But different.” Or “It’s a hard thing to be a Jew, it’s harder to stay one.”
The last story is about an attorney Eli who is being pressured by his community to stop a group of Orthodox Jews from wearing their traditional clothing outside of the Yeshiva. The story turns into a stream of consciousness that represents Philip Roth’s mastery of language and plot to end this timeless
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Overrated. ( )

I liked Goodbye, Columbus better this time than when I first read it. However, I feel there were many stereotypes of Jews presented and not enough of the positive characteristics that Jews possess. The final story presented mental illness in such a 2-dimensional manor that it was very offensive. The main positive result of this reading was that I found more wit in Goodbye, Columbus than I had previously. ( )

Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus. 1959. Modern Library, 1995.
Goodbye, Columbus is usually called Philip Roth’s first novel, although it is in truth a novella, usually published with five short stories to give it the heft it needed to sell as a book. It has been compared with the works of such writers as J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that it was a strong influence on The Graduate, both the 1963 novel and the 1967 film. Some orthodox Jews criticized it for self-loathing antisemitism. Others had trouble with its treatment of sex and other distasteful matters. And Roth, himself, was critical of it late in his career. He was especially unhappy with his failure to achieve the tone he wanted in some of the short stories. Rereading it after several decades, I can see two main threads in it that still speak to us. First, it is thoroughly modernist. Neil, the narrator of the novella, wanders through the Jewish suburbs of Newark looking to give meaning to his life, but he never looks inward for it, never seems to see that the shallowness he sees in his own family and in his Radcliffe amour Brenda’s upwardly mobile one is a projection of his own emptiness. Second, like all the great modernists, it hopes to put its ethnicity and locality into a modern context. Its characters often have trouble reconciling their ethnicity with the often value-free demands of 20th-Century American life. It is telling, I think, that the Holocaust is an unacknowledged monster in all these stories, even “Defender of the Faith,” that is set in World War II. It leaves almost all the characters, to borrow the phrase from Yeats that Chinua Achebe used in a similar context, “no longer at ease.” ( )

After reading a bit of the title novella, I realized that I had begun reading this once before and had apparently put it down without finishing. It just felt like more of what, after having read a couple of other Roth books, seemed like more of the same -- which is to say a smart Jewish guy being kind of shitty to an unlikable woman. I'm happy to read this sort of story, but when it begins to feel like the only story an author tells, it gets a little old. I slogged through the title novella anyway (it was only about 100 pages, after all) and was happy to read wholly different types of story in the other five pieces in the book. I especially liked "The Conversion of the Jews," "Defender of the Faith," and "Epstein." ( )