By the early 1930s he showed his work at the John Reed Club; he also participated in one of the 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions, with a statue that denounced the racism and the violent lynchings of African Americans in the US.
Art historian Andrew Hemingway had high praise for the work; rather than the stereotypical depiction of a muscular body, Goodelman, influenced perhaps by the work of Amedeo Modigliani, created a slender, elegant figure that "systematically...counter[ed] every offensive stereotype of the black male: excessive sexuality, emotional display, intellectual deficiency", in the words of Hemingway.
Art historian Milly Heid described the figure as that of a "rather effeminate naked young man, his body intact, his eyes drooping".
Goodelman, she says, "plays on the discrepancy between the beauty of the protagonist and his fate and on the painful contradiction between the poetic title Necklace and the strangling noose".
[3] Goodelman had his first one-man exhibition in 1933, and Necklace was received very well, being singled out and drawing praise from reviewers in the New York City papers and in Art News.
[10] Goodelman provided the illustrations for Leon Elbe's book Yingele ringele[3] and the second (1922) cover design for the Workmen's Circle's children's magazine Kinderland.