“Just telling Jewish people that I was studying Arabic, I would get very, very negative reactions without even getting into the politics,” said Eliana Fishman, 25, who majored in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth and studied in Morocco.

At the same time, Americans know that they remain, irrevocably, outsiders among Arabs, often viewed with suspicion. And after cheering the stirrings of the Arab Spring, the students admit to being disillusioned by its results, including the empowerment of Islamist factions.

Many American students, Jewish or not, insist that they felt safe in Arab countries, but recent violence has cut short study-abroad programs in several places. Andrew Pochter, a Jewish student at Kenyon College, was killed in June in a street protest in Alexandria, weeks after Christopher Stone, a professor at Hunter College, was stabbed in Cairo, reportedly targeted for being American.

Many Jews avoid revealing their religious identity in the Middle East, believing that it would put them at greater risk; for that reason, some of those interviewed insisted that they not be identified, because they intend to return to the region. Americans also find that in Arab countries, even more problematic than coming from a Jewish or Christian background is adhering to no faith at all.

“One doesn’t always want to admit to being Jewish in the Muslim world, but atheism is generally beyond comprehension, beyond acceptance,” said Zachary Lockman, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at New York University, who is Jewish, but not religious.

The same young people who contend that Americans have simplistic views of the Arab world say the problem is worse in the other direction: grinding poverty, lack of education and government-controlled news media often translate to cartoonish images of the United States and Israel. In Cairo, especially, women face daily sexual harassment, and for Western women, the problem is magnified by exaggerated assumptions about their sexual permissiveness.

For decades, American policy makers lamented how few people in the United States studied the Middle East, leaving a shortage of expertise in the military, the intelligence services and the diplomatic corps. Arabic, which is not part of the Indo-European language family, is a challenge for Western students; generally, they must learn not only the Modern Standard Arabic that is understood from Iraq to Morocco, but also one of the local variants that people actually speak day to day, and classical Arabic if they want to read literature or the Koran.