To that end, Mr. Reeves quickly learned to speak in code when in public. “Israel became ‘Disneyland,’ Tel Aviv was ‘Epcot,’ and Jerusalem was called, ‘Cinderella’s Castle,’ ” he said. For Ms. Nusbaum, the experience of being delayed at the Israeli border for nearly five hours when she tried to cross from Jordan into the West Bank was both frustrating and enlightening. “I had stamps in my passport from Lebanon and Syria so they questioned me extensively before letting me through,” she said. “It gave me a real taste of what the Palestinians go through.”

Female American students also see what life is like for women in the Middle East. Hannah McDermott, 20, a senior this year at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, spent last semester in Cairo researching women’s rights issues in Egypt, including female genital mutilation and human trafficking, for a United Nations organization. Though she said it helped her decide her future (she would like to work on women’s issues in Iran and Afghanistan), she remembers feeling the sting of “every man’s eyes,” despite dressing conservatively. No wonder it is not unusual for American mothers to worry about their daughters studying here. When Ms. McDermott told her mother her study-abroad destination, she said, ‘Why can’t you just go to France like other kids?”

Anna Khandros, 21, faced a similar reaction from her family when she told them she wanted to study in Beirut. “It is not easy to get your parents to let you go to a country with a State Department travel advisory, that is also home to a U.S. defined terrorist group, and that just went through a war,” said Ms. Khandros, who this academic year will be back at Brandeis and spent last semester at the American University of Beirut. Once there, however, any anxiety evaporated. “A.U.B. is like a resort,” said Ms. Khandros, who is studying the history of the modern Middle East. “My dorms look out over the beach and Beirut is an incredibly cosmopolitan and safe city during peaceful times.”

Last year, 135 American study-abroad students were enrolled at the American University of Beirut, according to Rania Murr, the university’s international student services coordinator. “The year after the war,” she said, referring to the 2006 conflict, “we actually had an increase of American students.” She said that during the war many preferred to stay in the mountains with the families of fellow Lebanese students than to return home.

American University in Washington, which has had a 400 percent increase in the number of students studying in the Middle East since 2004, stopped sending students to Beirut after 2006. “Getting our students out during the war was very difficult,” said Sara Dumont, the director of American University Abroad (the State Department travel advisory says that American citizens must arrange their own travel out of Lebanon if unrest occurs).

J. Scott Van Der Meid, the director of study abroad at Brandeis, said the university never stopped sending students to Beirut but now provides them with a special type of emergency evacuation insurance. “Clearly the Middle East is an area of the world that is on our students’ radar screen and we don’t want to prohibit them from going there,” Mr. Van Der Meid said. “But we need to keep them safe.”

THOUGH American University has halted its Beirut program, it is starting one in Syria this spring. “Few Syrians speak English, so it is a better place for American students to really immerse themselves in the language,” Ms. Dumont said, noting that most of the classes are taught in English at American University in Cairo and in Beirut.

“These students know there is a shortage in America of Arabic speakers,” she said. “Knowing the language can only increase their job prospects.”

To that end, Middlebury College students are obligated to take a “language pledge” to speak only Arabic during their time in Alexandria, Egypt (the only exception being calls home). Michael Kremer, 21, a senior at Tufts University, is nearly fluent after attending Middlebury’s program. “I learned so much more Arabic than any of my friends studying on other programs,” he said, adding that they were housed in dormitories with local students with whom they practiced their Arabic.

Already most of these students have seen their experiences in the Middle East translate into coveted internships and jobs. Brian Reeves spent this summer working for a congresswoman in Washington, as well as doing research for the Jewish Dialogue Group, a grass-roots organization trying to foster constructive discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within Jewish communities.

Alex Thompson, from Princeton, earned a paid internship in Cairo this summer with a social entrepreneurship nongovernmental organization helping Egyptians write business plans. And William Zeman, a senior at American University, returned from a study-abroad program at the America-Mideast Educational and Training Services in Cairo with more than 20 clips, some front page, from an internship at the Daily News Egypt, an English-language newspaper.

More important, these students say they now view the region completely differently. Kathryn Baxter, 20, a student at American University, said of her time in Egypt, “I will never again look at a story about the Middle East with such a one-sided perspective.” Anthony Clairmont, 21, a senior at Sewanee: The University of the South, who spent six months in Morocco, said, “I genuinely enjoyed watching the bottom fall out of every one of my preconceived ideas about the Muslim world.”

Yet none of them said they had confronted anti-American sentiment, other than occasional disagreements over foreign policy. “I found that whether I was in Cairo, Aswan, Amman or Damascus, people with whom I interacted wanted to talk about common interests — family, sports, music and economics — rather than our struggles and disagreements,” said Richard Frohlichstein, 21, a senior at Georgetown University who spent last autumn at American University in Cairo.

Or as Anna Oltman, 21, a senior at Franklin & Marshall College, said about her semester in Egypt: “For better or worse, and certainly not unintentionally, 9/11 linked our generation of Americans with its parallel generation of Middle Easterners. We need to get to know them.”