American Jews, or Jewish Americans, are Jews who are American citizens or resident aliens. The United States is home to the second largest Jewish community in the world (after Israel) depending on religious definitions and varying population data. The American Jewish population was estimated to be approximately 5,128,000 (1.7%) of the total population in 2007 (301,621,000).

However, it may be as high as 6,444,000 (2.2%). As a contrast, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated the Israeli Jewish population was 5,435,800 in 2007 (75.7% of the average population). The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, and their U.S.-born descendants.

There is, however, a minority from all Jewish ethnic divisions including Sephardics and Mizrahis, as well as a number of converts. The Jewish community in America, therefore, manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as encompassing the full spectrum of religious observance, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi communities to Jews who live a secular lifestyle. Jews have been present in what is today the United States of America as early as the seventeenth century, if not earlier, though they were small in numbers and almost exclusively Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry.

Until about 1830 Charleston, South Carolina had more Jews than anywhere else in North America. Large scale Jewish immigration, however, did not commence until the nineteenth century, when, by mid-century, many secular Ashkenazi Jews from Germany arrived in the United States, primarily becoming merchants and shop-owners. There were approximately 250,000 Jews in the United States by 1880, many of them being the educated, and largely secular, German Jews, although a minority population of the older Sephardic Jewish families remained influential.

Jewish immigration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, as a result of persecution in parts of Eastern Europe. Most of these new immigrants also were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, though most came from the poor rural populations of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement, located in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. Over 2,000,000 Jews arrived between the late nineteenth century and 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 and the National Origins Quota of 1924 restricted immigration.

Most settled in New York City and its immediate environs (New Jersey, etc.), establishing what became one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population.

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