Elman was born in
New York City, and was raised in
Montreal,
Quebec. He attended
Jewish day school in Montreal and has taught fourth-graders at a
synagogue religious school in
Southern California. In Montreal, Elman began performing in plays such as ''
The Children's Hour and Annie Get Your Gun before landing his first roles in TV (Are You Afraid of the Dark?) and film (Johnny Mnemonic''). Elman graduated from
McGill University with a
BA in English. He was part of the ensemble cast of the film
Shattered Glass opposite
Hayden Christensen and
Peter Sarsgaard, and has guest-starred on numerous popular series including
Crossing Jordan,
Criminal Minds,
Without a Trace,
CSI: NY and
The Closer. Recent roles include starring opposite
Armand Assante in
California Dreaming which won the Un Certain Regard award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival; portraying a young
Sigmund Freud, again opposite Assante and Ben Cross, in
When Nietzsche Wept; and on the small screen, where he improvised with
Larry David in HBO's
Curb Your Enthusiasm. In 2009, Elman began work on his first webseries titled
Brainstorm for
Dailymotion.com. In April 2010, Elman appeared on the soap opera
The Young and the Restless as Jamie Peterson. Elman and
Eli Batalion direct and act in
YidLife Crisis, a series of short comedy sketches about two 30-something
Jewish friends. Most of the dialog is in
Yiddish, which the two use as a secret language, but subtitles are provided in English and French. The duo performed at Montreal's
Segal Centre for Performing Arts for a week in January 2022. ==Filmography==