He was the first to report Israel's destruction of Arab air forces on the opening day of the Six-Day War in 1967.

[1] He was embarrassed that his parents spoke Yiddish and that his father walked ahead of his mother in the street.

[1] He fell in with hoodlums in New York,[2] then moved to the American West Coast as a union organiser before joining his brother Saul to write scripts in Hollywood.

[1][2] He worked in Europe in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA[2] during the second world war.

[1] A month later Britain and France invaded Suez as Israeli tanks moved into Sinai.

[1] The journalist David Sells said: Elkins never modified his New York accent and growl, making him unusual among the BBC's correspondents.

"[1] Arab lobbyists in the Middle East protested that the BBC should not employ a Jew and a Zionist to report the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[1] Elkins said in a BBC talk, A Jew at Christmas, that he lost his Jewish faith when Santa Claus refused a present at Macy's department store when he was eight, saying: "This ain't for you, Jewboy.

John Le Carré, in “The Pigeon tunnel”, mentions a conversation with Elkins about his direct involvement in extrajudicial killings of alleged nazi war criminals, within the secret organization DIN/Nakam.

[citation needed] Elkins wrote Forged in Fury in 1971, about the Jewish hunt for Nazi war criminals.

[1] He joined the Jerusalem Report magazine as ombudsman and letters editor in 1990 and worked for another 10 years.