Nathan Straus (January 31, 1848 – January 11, 1931) was an American businessman and philanthropist who co-owned two of New York City's largest department stores, R. H. Macy & Company and Abraham & Straus. He was the namesake for the Israeli city of Netanya.

Nathan Straus was born to a German Jewish family in Otterberg in the former Palatinate, then ruled by the Kingdom of Bavaria (now part of present-day Germany), the third child of Lazarus Straus (1809–1898) and his second wife, Sara (1823–1876). His siblings were Hermine Straus Kohns (1846–1922), Isidor Straus (1845–1912), and Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1926). The family moved to the U.S. state of Georgia in 1854. After losing everything in the American Civil War the family moved to New York City, where his father formed L. Straus & Sons, a crockery and glassware firm. The Straus family owned slaves and conducted business with other slave owners, taking several formerly enslaved people to the North with the family following the defeat of the Confederacy.

On April 28, 1875, Straus married Lina Gutherz (1854–1930), with whom he had six children: Jerome Nathan Straus (1876–1893); Sara Gutherz Straus (1877–1878); Sara "Sissie" Straus (1879–1950), married to Irving Lehman (1876–1945), Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals from 1940 until his death; Roland Straus (1881–1884); State Senator Nathan Straus Jr. (1889–1961); and Hugh Grant Straus (1890–1961).

Straus and his brothers sold crockery to R. H. Macy & Company department store. The brothers became partners in Macy's in 1888 and co-owners in 1896.

In 1893, he and Isidor bought Joseph Wechsler's interest in the Abraham and Wechsler dry-goods store in Brooklyn, New York, which they renamed as Abraham & Straus.

In the late 1880s, Straus began a period of philanthropy and public service in New York City. He served as a member of the Board of Education from 1889 to 1891, as a parks commissioner from 1890 to 1894, and as president of the Board of Health and commissioner of the Department of Health in 1898. In 1894 he was selected by Tammany Hall to run for Mayor on the Democratic ticket, but withdrew from the race when his friends in society threatened to shun him if he did.

In 1892, he and his wife privately funded the Nathan Straus Pasteurized Milk Laboratory to provide pasteurized milk to children to combat infant mortality and tuberculosis. In his battles with the disease he opened the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children at Lakewood Township, New Jersey (later it was moved to Farmingdale, New Jersey) in 1909. Their book, Disease in Milk: The Remedy Pasteurization: The Life Work of Nathan Straus records that unclean, unpasteurized milk fed to infants was the chief cause of tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and other diseases that were the main cause of a 25% infant mortality rate in the U.S. in 1890, 15% in 1903 (but 7% in New York in 1900, where pasteurized milk had already become the norm) (it is now below 1% in the U.S.). Straus is credited as the leading proponent of the pasteurization movement, which eliminated the hundreds of thousands of deaths per year then due to disease-bearing milk.

During the economic panic of 1893, Straus used his milk stations to sell coal at the very low price of 5 cents for 25 pounds to those who could pay. Those who could not received coal free. He also opened homeless shelters for 64,000 people, who could get a bed and breakfast for 5 cents, and he funded 50,000 meals for one cent each. He also gave away thousands of turkeys anonymously. At Abraham & Straus he noticed that two of his employees were starving themselves to save their wages to feed their families, so he established what may have been the first subsidized company cafeteria.^{[citation needed]}