Salem is a city in Salem County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is the county seat of Salem County, the state's most rural county. The name Salem, for both the city and county, is derived from the Hebrew word shalom, meaning peace. As of the 2020 United States census, the city's population was 5,296, an increase of 150 (+2.9%) from the 2010 census count of 5,146, which in turn reflected a decrease of 711 (−12.1%) from the 5,857 counted in the 2000 census. Salem is part of the Delaware Valley or Philadelphia greater metropolitan area.

Robert Gibbon Johnson, also known as Colonel Johnson, was an American gentleman farmer, historian, horticulturalist, judge, soldier, and statesman who lived in Salem, New Jersey. He is especially renowned for the probably-apocryphal story that he publicly ate a basket of tomatoes at the Old Salem County Courthouse in 1820 to demonstrate that they were not poisonous like many other nightshades, as was supposedly-commonly thought at the time. He was a keen antiquarian and wrote a history of Salem – An Historical Account of the First Settlement of Salem, in West Jersey – published by Orrin Rogers in 1839.