During the Democratic primary, as mainstream media outlets struggled to define Bernie Sanders’s avowed socialism, many latched onto his time volunteering on a Jewish kibbutz in Israel. “Bernie Sanders’s Kibbutz Found. Surprise: It’s Socialist,” read one characteristic headline in the New York Times.

But Sanders’s 1963 trip was less illustrative than the Times and others have assumed. Held up as something of a socialist paradise, the kibbutz — and the Labor Zionism that animates it — is anything but.

As envisioned by its founders, the kibbutz (or gathering, in Hebrew) was to be a utopian rural community, fusing egalitarian and communal ideals with those of Zionism and Jewish nationalism. In this voluntary collective community, Jewish newcomers would enjoy joint ownership of property, economic equality, and cooperation in production, and the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would reign supreme.