SO THIS IS ALEX FEIN - AUG 23, 2009 and more recent trolling!

CAPTAIN Pugwash was delighted when the Sensible Jew announced she was shutting up. Captain Pugwash is what's known in cyberspace as a troll - an anonymous commentator who enters an online discussion to post abusive, inflammatory and disruptive messages.

The Sensible Jew is a blog set up in May to stimulate debate among Melbourne Jews about what its author perceives to be failings of Jewish community leaders.

Until recently, it, too, has been anonymous.

The site's commentary on community affairs, and its labelling of high-profile local Jewish leaders as ''unrepresentative swill'', sent a ripple through Melbourne Jewry.

From community leaders, there was defensiveness. From trolls like Captain Pugwash, there was abuse. And on all sides there was a guessing game: Who is the Sensible Jew?

Last month, when the author of the Sensible Jew announced the blog was temporarily closing, Captain Pugwash was beside himself, claiming credit for the site's demise.

''The best part of this whole thing was just seeing how easy it is to derail and, ultimately, destroy a site like this,'' he wrote. ''It's been a blast!''

He also took a punt at the identify of the Sensible Jew, speculating she was ''just another chubby Jewish housewife''.

As it turns out, she is female. But she's tall, not chubby, and hardly a housewife.

And, after a one-month hiatus, her blog is back in action, and she's outed herself: she is Alex Fein, 34, who, in between blogging on Jewish identity, community leadership, and the motivation of terrorists, runs what she describes as a nascent cosmetics business.

She says her initial decision to remain anonymous and then to temporarily close the blog are linked to serious and sensitive family issues. But she's been amused by the guessing game.

''They'd always assumed it was a male. They could not conceive of a Jewish female with such a big mouth,'' Ms Fein says.

''People were assuming it was not only a man, but one of a particular generation, a young Boomer, and an insider. I'm an outsider, generation X, and female - and that gobsmacked people who found out.''

She says she was struck by the response to the blog. The site regularly attracts up to 500 visitors a day, and closer to 3000 in June, when The Sunday Age first reported on the debate it has sparked, and the emergence of Ms Fein's mother, the writer Yvonne Fein, as the blog's public representative.

But despite the number of readers, only a handful would regularly leave comments.

While most of the messages, even from critics, were rational, a significant minority were highly abusive. She found this intolerance of debate to be ''symptomatic of something quite disturbing'' within the Jewish community.

Many readers, she says, were reluctant to enter the debate, fearing not only abuse from trolls like Capitan Pugwash, but the ''aggressive debating style'' of conservative community leaders.

''Such people felt that if their opinions were made public, they would be publicly shamed, ridiculed, or defamed,'' she wrote last month when she announced the blog was closing.

''Again, such people were not propagating radical views, and ours is not a violent community, so it shocked me profoundly that there was enough fear to keep a significant number quiet.''

What she detected, she says, was that many Australian Jews were ''easily shamed about not being Jewish enough''. They ''feel somehow less able to defend their position because only the most vociferous is seen as a rightful Jewish representative''.

The reluctance of people to enter the debate led her to ponder if a ''bullied'' mentality had taken hold, leading to a ''bizarre submission to some unrepresentative collective ideal of what a good Jew should be''.

Ms Fein says her own decision to initially remain anonymous, and then to temporarily silence the Sensible Jew, had nothing to do with fear of intimidation - at least not in Australia, and not within the Jewish community.

Instead, a family member was concerned that the safety of relatives living overseas could be jeopardised if Ms Fein was publicly identified with a blog related to Jewish issues.

Ms Fein won't go into details of what she says are sensitive family issues, but the relatives are non-Jews, living in the Muslim Middle East. If her blog was ever a danger to them - something Ms Fein doubts - the danger has now passed.

So she's resumed blogging, under her own name. She plans to write on the Middle East, religion, freedom of speech, the drug problem among young Jews, and the role of public relations and propaganda. And then there's terrorism.

Captain Pugwash, meanwhile, hasn't been lost for words. He's back, posting abusive, sexist and racist comments, anonymously, using multiple names all posted from the same address.