If The Heartbreak Kid is about a hapless Jewish man, Lenny Cantrow who falls for a hot, American blonde of upper-middle-class WASP extraction, Kelly Corcoran, then Goodbye, Columbus is about a hapless Jewish man, Neil Klugman, who falls for a Jewish girl going on WASP, Brenda Patimkin, from a nouveau riche, middle-class family. In each, the choice of mate is a sort of repudiation of the man's values, in each, the parents of the girl do not approve, and in each the family belongs to a well-off socioeconomic status. In this film, Brenda Patimkin reflects on how her family used to live in the Bronx, where Neil currently resides with his aunt. "Oh, we used to live in the Bronx," she says. The Patimkin's are social climbers, having made money selling construction-parts, they want nothing to do with their first-level immigrant past as Jews. The family — the mother, the brother, and the girt, except for the father, who is played by Jack Klugman (opposite the character Neil Klugman) — have all undergone rhinoplasty to hide their Jewish identity, and now they live in a WASP-ish neighborhood. However, their Yidishe identity comes through, for example, when the father refers to his little girl as his tsatschkele, his little pet. This film reflects the identity problems revolving around assimilation that American Jews faced in the mid-late twentieth century.
However, in a way, this film is a counterpoint to The Heartbreak Kid. There, Leonard Cantrow successfully, if naively, "assimilates" by marrying into the Corcoran family, here, Neil Klugman ultimately cannot stand the assimilated Patimkin family. If he saw in Brenda the image of the "hot" "non-Jewish" shiksa, what he found instead was the Jewish American Princess. Although he forces her to break traditional boundaries, she ultimately sides with her papa. Neil rejects Brenda's association with this well-off, assimilated family and says Goodbye, Columbus.
What is fascinating about the title is that it simultaneously represents the assimilated family, as well as a larger conversation about the Jewish people and Zionism. The brother repeatedly plays a record album from his alma mater, The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He pines after his days as the quarterback of the football team and the attention that was lauded on him. So for him, Goodbye, Columbus is nostalgic. But for Neil, it is deeper. There was a 1926 Yiddish theatre song that the screenwriter Philip Roth may have picked up. The song was called “Ikh For Aheym,” “I’m going home.” The song featured the line, “Zay gezunt, Kolumbes,” “Goodbye, Columbus,” as in the legendary colonizer of the Americas. But, here, the song is referring to assimilated, American Jews returning to the Land of Israel (British Mandate Palestine), and making aliyah as Zionists and rejecting the materialism which America offered. Thereby, by rejecting the Patimkin's, Neil is simultaneously rejecting the nostalgic, assimilated life of the brother who only cares about American football and the comfy life of materialism. However, we do not know what Neil chooses. Does he become a Zionist, a librarian, a communist, a captialist, or does he find a proper shiksa, like Lenny Cantrow? The film just does not tell us.
