How to deal with passive aggressive ppl without resorting to being a jerk too?

I’m new to this sub and I hope my story goes with the rules here 🙂

I’m in a social dilemma with my neighbour. Husband (39M) and I (36F) moved to a small town earlier this year and folks have been very welcoming, even though we’re foreigners and my English is not 100% perfect (working on that, but it takes time and practice). Our nextdoor neighbours were specially kind to us in the beginning, inviting us to their house and coming over for dinner or bbq at our place as well, to the point where we can say we were all becoming friends.

But for the past two months or so I’ve noticed some passive aggressive attitude towards me from the man in that couple, which I’ll refer to as J. He has in several occasions made fun of my accent, in a way that’s meant to be a joke so that others won’t necessarily see the offense in it. I’ve never said anything back but never laughed it off either, just changed the subject. I can’t say for sure, but I have a strong intuition that he noticed my discomfort and had a kick out of it, and so keeps doing it.

There were other instances where he tried to mock me for various reasons, and he seems to have found a weak spot in the way that I care for and love my 6-month old puppy. They’ve got two dogs that roam free in the neighborhood, including our property (“they are keeping the bears away“), and have zero training. So J has noticed that we try our best to train our pup and that we want him to live indoors with us most of the time. It seems that our efforts are somehow offensive to him, even though we’ve never said ANYTHING, ever, about the way he treats his dogs (even after we got a noise complaint from the district regarding a dog that barks all night – our puppy sleeps soundly in his crate every night, so guess whose dog has been barking).

To keep things short, I’ll just write about the last and most absurd episode. The weather was great and my husband decided to invite some neighbours to a bbq in our yard. J and his wife replied that they were going to an event later, but would try to pop by to say hello. So we proceeded to make food for the actual amount of people that were supposed to be at the table. They showed up eventually, with an extra person we had met already but didn’t know was coming, and of course we offered food. They accepted, we prepared more food and life goes on. Then J decided he was bothered by the fact that my puppy was tethered (to a 20 foot leash, let me add) and wasn’t allowed to run freely with his dogs (they had come along, bc nobody can stop them from coming over). J said, “Man, I wish I could see your dog run free.” I explained that I didn’t trust him yet to not follow his dogs into our pond and out on the road, our property wasn’t fenced yet and his recall is a work in progress. J didn’t reply, just waited a few more minutes and said the same thing again. I just answered that the dog was fine, he had played off leash earlier at the (fully fenced) dog park. More minutes passed, and J said the same thing AGAIN. No one answered this time, even his wife had become quiet on the matter and my husband was happily grilling. So now J feels he has a point to make, so he gets up, asks my husband for a frisbee, goes to where my dog is and starts taunting him, throwing the frisbee around.

So, this is a person invited to my house, sitting at my table, eating the food I’m offering and basically being a jerk to me. I felt so angry at that moment, seeing that his wife was embarrassed to muteness and that he was just having fun being a bully to someone that has always been nice to him. I got up, took my dog, went inside and didn’t come back out.

I feel I could have done better. My husband was very upset with me that I’d left him there to deal with a situation that he wasn’t aware of (he was mostly watching the grill, popping into the conversation now and then). But I really am at a loss, I don’t know what else I can say to J to make him stop being an ass to me. We do our best to fit in in a foreign country, in a small town that has so few people it’s not like we have the luxury of cutting neighbours out of our lives. And over a week has gone by and neither J nor his wife felt the need to apologize to me. It’s as if it’s normal to treat people like that, no biggie.

So folks, what advice do you have for me? What can I do to assert myself when I’m treated like that without pushing the neighbours away?