Madonna may be fronting the Kabbalah-backed charity Raising Malawi, but girl needs to brush up on her U.S.-Africa relations if she's gonna use her sales pitch. The Material Girl, who will be pitching New York City on her new album, Hard Candy, at the Roseland Ballroom next week, premiered her documentary I Am Because We Are, about Africa, last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, trashing the U.S. government's African outreach while failing to mention the (somewhat paltry) $35m we send them every year in aid.

But her foreign relations ignorance was only the half of it for one unamused gossip-slash-critic especially with the way Madge forced her mystical Jewish offshoot on audiences without giving 'em a head's up.

Is Madonna the new Tom Cruise? At least he makes it painfully clear about the crazy stories he believes in.

But the worst thing about Madonna’s take on the poor southern African country of Malawi is that she and the gardener — Nathan Rissman — deliver a sizeable wallop of the Kabbalah Center of Los Angeles without informing the audience about what’s going on.

Indeed, the film uses Harvard celebrity sycophant Jeffrey Sachs and a number of Malawi government officials, mixing them in with Kabbalah staff and philosophy. Even Bill Clinton is thrown into the mix. The result is that all these people, considering heavyweights, seem implicity to endorse Kabbalah.

What Madonna and Rissman conveniently leave out of “I Am” is the SFK, a philosophy adopted by the Malawians in the film, stands for Spirituality for Kids, which is the teaching curriculum for Philip Berg’s Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles. The Kabbalah Center has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s a wholly original process conceived by Berg and his wife Karen. Some might say it’s a pyramid scheme. At the very least, it’s a cult.

Madonna and Rissman are clever about the way “SFK” is woven into “I Am,” too. For the first hour of the film it’s not even mentioned. Instead, we hear and see horror stories of Malawi children and mothers living with and dying from AIDS. We’re told over and over that Madonna’s foundation is going to change all of this.

And yet, Madonna’s foundation, Raising Malawi, still remains unregistered as an official charity in the United States. Her Web site, refers back to Spirituality for Kids, a main division of the Kabbalah Center. High up members of Kabbalah are also on the Raising Malawi board. Contributions made to Raising Malawi — like the $3.7 million raised with Gucci in February — go straight to “SFK” and Kabbalah. [Fox 411]