The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is an allegory about the social relations between a Christian majority and a Jewish minority.

As with most metaphoric storytelling, you could always make the case that this new movie’s “The Herdmans” are a stand-in for all outsiders, and not specific to Jews…

But the parallels between the two are there.

Which got me thinking:

What if the dialogue literally swapped every mention of “The Herdmans” with “The Jews?”

The screenplay’s current linguistic obfuscation allows the story to be allegorical, by leaving space for the characters and their actions to be viewed individualistically, and not solely as a representation of the group they allegorically represent (#NotAllJews).

But if the movie shrunk this linguistic space by having the characters explicitly refer to The Herdmans as The Jews — which is already latent in the existing allegory — The Best Christmas Pageant Ever would become a provocative study, in contradistinction, of how allegories operate.